Monday, June 25, 2018

Candied Cranberries

Long ago, we bought a house and the agent sent us a recipe for candied cranberries. It looked delicious, so I promptly tried it and have never bought canned ones since. It is simply amazing, and I've shared the recipe with many over the years and several friends have asked me to put it on my blog, so here it is (finally)! Maybe you all can start a new tradition just like I did. I make it every year, and since I learned to can, I make enough to last for the whole year. Last year, I had one jar left over from the year before, and everyone agreed that it's even better after aging a year. I also tried a new trick, adding some baking soda to one batch and reducing the sugar by half, and we liked those even better than the regular ones! The flavors were much bolder, the orange and ginger notes came out beautifully (my Dad threatened to steal the whole batch he liked it so much) so this year I'm planning on experimenting some more with that and I'll update this post when I do.

Candied Cranberries
2 lbs cranberries or 3 12 oz bags
2 ½ C sugar
zest and ½ C juice from 2 large oranges or 3 smaller ones (Try to get organic ones, since we are using the peel, or get a good veggie wash that removes the wax and chemicals. Trader Joe's has one made from grapefruit seeds that I like.)
2 T grated fresh ginger

Optional modifications:
1 tsp baking soda
Reduce sugar to 1¼ cups

Wash oranges to remove the wax, chemicals and transport grime.
The easy way: use a vegetable peeler to peel off the zest. The hard way: use a zester to zest the oranges.
Slice the oranges in half and juice them. If you don't have a juicer, get a fork and stick it in the meat of the orange and then squeeze the juice out. You only need half a cup of juice, so feel free to enjoy the rest!
 Rinse the cranberries, picking out the ones that look bad.
The easy way: peel and slice the ginger. The hard way: use the zester to grate it.
The easy way: pour some cranberries into your food processor until it's about half full, then put the peeled zest and sliced ginger on top. Chop it all up nice and fine, scraping the sides if needed.
Put everything into a large sauce pan (I make double or triple batches so I use a stock pot) and cook over medium high, stirring frequently until everything is nice and gooey.
The easy way: use an immersion blender to blend it all up until it's at the consistency you want. The hard way: use a spoon to stir and pop cranberries against the side of the pot until it's at the consistency you want.
If you're canning, fill prepared jars to a quarter inch from the top and water bath for 20 minutes. If not, it's ready to serve or put in the fridge for later. If served fresh it can be kinda tart so I'd add a bit more sugar. A few days of sitting sitting in the fridge, or in jars if canned, mellows it out quite a bit.

Notes: The half sugar batch came out delicious, but it never firmed up like the full sugar recipe does. It was also a bit more acidic than I prefer, so I'm planning on playing with the recipe this year and seeing if I can tweak it and if adding some pectin might help it firm up. I'm not sure about the chemistry of the baking soda and natural pectin in the cranberries. Perhaps the baking soda interacts in a way that disables the pectin and that's why it never firmed, but I really don't know. If you know anything about it, leave a comment or shoot me an email!

Edit: I did some searching online and found an interesting article which mentions that baking soda breaks down pectin. Apparently to such an extent that it was used to speed up the softening of boiled vegetables and other interesting uses. So there appears to be no way to have firm cranberries that have baking soda in them. It's good to know! Here's the article if you're interested in being a bit of a geek with me. Unfortunately it's only available as a pdf, but it's still a neat read.

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