Red Wine Cranberry Sauce
Boujie, classy, fancy? All words that can be used to describe your dinner if you make our Red Wine Cranberry Sauce! This sweet tangy sauce uses spices, citrus, and ginger in the recipe, but those flavors are very subtle. They blend perfectly to enhance the red wine, brown sugar, and of course the tartness and distinct flavor of cranberries!
Disclaimer, we would never knock traditional canned cranberry sauce. Although, can we really call it sauce? It’s more of a jelly, right? Anyway, canned cranberry sauce is what has been on our family table for years. Our grandmother loved it. She and a few other family members were the only ones who would eat it. We put a small little sliver on our plates every once in a while, mainly for color if we’re being honest. When we decided to host our free Cooksgiving class, we wanted to focus on sauces.
When you ask someone what they’re most looking forward to eating for Thanksgiving, most people don’t name gravy and sauces, but these staples can do wonders to help elevate our favorite dishes. So we thought about how we could put some shine on traditional foods that live in the shadows. Since traditional cranberry sauce is not our favorite, we wanted to try to change that. From there we got to work creating this recipe and we are excited to debut it at our family Thanksgiving dinner this year!
Beware, if you bring this to Thanksgiving dinner, be prepared to bring it every year! Luckily, this Red Wine Cranberry Sauce is extremely easy to whip up! In fact, if you’re doing a lot of cooking this year, it will probably be your easiest recipe!
Red Wine Cranberry Sauce
Serves 24
Prep time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 20-25 minutes
Ingredients
12 oz cranberries - fresh or frozen
1 ¼ cup packed dark brown
1 cup dry red wine
1 slice fresh ginger root (about ½ inch thick)
2-3 slivers of orange peel (each about 3 inches long
Orange juice from your orange (about ¼ cup)
¼ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp allspice
pinch salt
Directions:
Pre- Prep: Wash your orange and fresh cranberries. Measure ingredients.
Add sugar, wine, ginger, orange peel, orange juice, cinnamon, allspice and salt into a medium pot and cook on low for about 1 min until sugar has begun to dissolve.
Add cranberries and simmer on low for 15-20 minutes or until cranberries have begun to pop and break down. Then use a spatula or spoon to smash the cranberries against the sides of the pot until all are broken down.
Continue simmering on low until the sauce thickens to a syrup-like consistency. Check and stir every few minutes to ensure the sauce is not sticking and burning on the bottom. It will continue to thicken some as it cools. Chill and serve!
Notes
If you want it smooth, let your sauce cool and then pour it into an upright blender or use an immersion hand blender and blend to your desired consistency.
If you want it less sweet, reduce the sugar by ¼ cup.
Want more of a spiced sauce? Start by increasing each spice by ¼ tsp.