Why Everyone Should Be Making Their Own Cranberry Sauce

Festive meals contain a lot of moving parts, and sometimes, the ability to pull them all off at once feels like it takes some kind of superhuman capacity. No wonder we’re all looking for shortcuts, hacks of all kinds, and as many ways as possible to make our lives easier. And I get it. Some dishes just aren’t worth the hassle. Why make your own gravy if you can get a perfectly good store-bought version? Why go through the effort of making stuffing from scratch if the boxed kind will do? 

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For many people, cranberry sauce falls into this category. It’s arguably the easiest dish to get away with buying premade. Who cares? They just have a tiny amount on their plates anyway. Well, I care. You should be making it from scratch. And here’s why. 

Cranberry Sauce: Not Just An Afterthought

There are plenty of good cranberry sauces out there: Canned, bottled, jarred…your options are endless. None of them, though, quite match up to the freshness and nuance that a homemade version gives. There’s a distinct difference between cranberries that have been cooked the morning of Thanksgiving, or a day or two before the big meal, and those that have been processed and canned weeks or months ahead of time. When you make it fresh, it tastes fresh. It has a proper tartness to it, a dense fruitiness, and a pleasingly chunky texture that all but disappears in some premade versions. It becomes something people want to put on their plate, not that they think they should because it’s there. 

Making cranberry sauce from scratch also allows you to adapt it to your tastes. If you like it to be more citrusy (which I do), you can throw in additional orange zest, or add a touch of lime zest for some brighter contrast. If you like it sweeter and more aromatic, you can add a touch of vanilla extract – this personally isn’t my style, but it might be yours! That’s the point. You’re not prescribed to what you get in a can, and its fairly basic, top-note sweetness. Cranberry sauce should be complex, not just sugary. By making it, you can ensure you actually develop those flavors. 

Easy Does It

The other reason to make cranberry sauce is that, to be honest, it’s one of the easiest things you can make for Thanksgiving. In its most basic form, you need three ingredients: Water, sugar, and cranberries, in a 1:1:4 ratio (so one cup of water, one cup of sugar, and four cups of cranberries). You can use fresh or frozen cranberries, but I’d recommend trying to look for the former, as they bring more texture to the table. 

Then, all you have to do is dissolve the sugar in the water, bring it to a boil, add the cranberries, and cook for about 10 minutes. That’s…it. Well, apart from your mix-ins: Add those when you take the cranberries off the heat. As it cools, the pectin in the berries will thicken and set the sauce, turning it into the gloriously chunky, jammy mass we all know, and some of us love. Well, I certainly do.