TANGY CRANBERRY SAUCE WITH PORT WINE

Try this tangy cranberry sauce with port wine. It’s citrus, fresh and perfect for paring your favourite meat or appetizers. Best when used chilled.

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Thanksgiving is approaching, and I have promised to post this easy, yet amazing homemade cranberry sauce recipe. But, every time I make this cranberry sauce, I never follow my original recipe and always change something on it and never write it down. So no wonder I don’t remember, what I did last time.

So this time, I finally took my camera Canon and took pictures step by step, what I was adding into my cranberry sauce, as well as took a pen and scribbled it on a piece a paper to remember, what I did. Hurray, I can finally add this recipe to my blog!

Cranberry sauce has a great use

This cranberry sauce is very versatile. You can use it to accompany any kind of meat (beef, pork, lamb) or poultry, as well as it can find its use on cheese platters, on toasts or crostini or could be used on pancakes or as a jam on pastries.

This recipe call for few ingredients, the main one is cranberries…then it’s port wine (you can use any port wine), brown sugar, apple, cinnamon sticks and clementines or oranges. From oranges, we will use the zest and the juice as well.

Prepare cranberry sauce day before

I usually prepare a double batch at Thanksgiving (middle of October) and the rest I will freeze and reuse for Christmas. I keep it in an airtight container, in the freezer (for a maximum of 3 months) and once it’s defrosted, I reheat it in a small saucepan and re-season, if needed.

Usually I add a bit of orange zest or a bit of sugar. And because, once it’s frozen and then defrosted, it might become more liquid, so by adding a bit of sugar, it will thicken again. The best way is to prepare this sauce a day before, so you have more time to take care of the turkey, stuffing, etc.

How to make cranberry sauce

So you start first with washing all fruits: cranberries, apple and orange. Remove the skin from the apple, cut and core. Grate the zest of one orange and squeeze the juice out of the orange as well. In a medium saucepan heat the port wine, brown sugar, orange zest, orange juice, cinnamon sticks and cut and cored apples. Bring to a boil and let gently boil for 5 minutes.

Then you add the cranberries and reduce to medium heat. Let simmer for 10 minutes, or until the cranberries starts to pop and fallen apart. Once the juices are reduced until desired thickness (you may as well add water or more orange juice to have your cranberry sauce more runny, if you like), take a potato masher and coarsely mash the cranberries until the mixture is chunky. Now remove the saucepan from the heat and let cool. Once cooled, remove cinnamon sticks and discard.

And here you have a simple cranberry sauce with a little twist of citrus and port wine. Nice tangy, sweet and colourful berry sauce, which can be accompanied to any meal, snack or pastry.

Hope you will enjoy it as much as I do and write me down in the comments, how did you do while preparing this amazing cranberry sauce.

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