109. Basic Cranberry Sauce

Date Cooked: October 12, 2009
Page: 373
Rating: C+

What Thanksgiving dinner would be complete without some cranberry sauce? Mine. I am not a fan of cranberry sauce, mostly because I am not a fan of cranberry jelly still perfectly molded from the can. I decided I would try some fresh from scratch cranberry sauce to see if that made a difference.

Starting with a bag of cranberries I went to work. In a saucepan I brought to a boil sugar, water and salt. Cranberry sauce contains a lot of sugar. I guess when there is more sugar than water I am in for something sweet… or at least that is what you would think. Once the solution was boiling I dumped in the cranberries and brought them back to a boil before letting them simmer. In a reasonably short period of time I could hear them bursting and it was almost done. It was fascinating to hear them pop and explode.

Once done I transferred them to a bowl and let them cool before serving.

Rating: C+. I personally found the sauce to be quite tart, even with the amount of sugar used. I didn’t mind the flavor but something just did sit well with me. A mouthful was cloyingly sweet until you bite into a cranberry and then everything becomes tart. I understand that a good cranberry sauce strikes a good balance between sweet and tart but it didn’t feel balanced. It felt like two distinct tastes, first sweet then tart, not a melding of the two. But taste aside the texture really put me off. The cranberries were either totally destroyed by the cooking process and nothing more than skin and mush or they were little tart pellets. Please bear in mind I am no connoisseur of cranberry sauce so maybe I just don’t like it… whether it’s good or not. I’m not going to miss it at dinner.