Fresh Cranberry Sauce Recipe - Vegan Christmas Recipes (With Video)

This transcription will have some mistakes because it is partially automated.

Hello and welcome to freshly served healthy vegan recipes. I’m Heather and today I’m going to show you another Christmas recipe a week up to Christmas I got a whole series of recipes going to make up your holiday meals.

You can find all of them at healthyveganrecipes.net/Christmas including today’s which is going to be a cranberry sauce made with some cranberries that were at one point fresh but we froze them to keep them because Phil’s mom bought them I don’t know a month ago.

Anyway, we are going to pour those cranberries into a pot and then what I’ve got is some orange zest so these is from the peel of an orange. You can either use a zester which is a special tool for this or a grater and just grate the very outer part of the orange just make sure you don’t get down to the white that is where it starts to get bitter.

And then we are going to (if I can find a strainer) put the juice from this half of orange (here we go) into the pot. Strainer is important so that you don’t get seeds and all I do is I take the orange and poke it with my zester or fork or whatever you have in handy and then just squeezed it right into the strainer.

Unlike so, you wanna make sure you get all that juice out of the orange, it’s gonna add some really nice flavor to your cranberries, it also helps to sweetened them, so that you don’t need to use as much sugar as usual.

Cranberries are quite tart so you do need to add some sweetness to them otherwise, probably none of your guest will enjoy them, you included.

I like cranberries on the tart site but even I need an epic of sweetener in there. Ok. So once you get all the juice out of that orange, you’re going to add some water and you want just enough that with the orange juice it comes up to just the level of the cranberries.

Coz what is gonna happen is you’re gonna put these to the stove and boil these cranberries and if there’s no water at the bottom there, they will burn. Which is not good!

Now the amount of water that you put in here isn’t critical, what will happen is the more water you put in the runnier it would be. (That’s not grammatically correct) the runnier it would be.

And the less water you put in, the more solid it will get as the cranberries boil and in my house it was always a struggle to get the cranberries to set before dinner. My mom used to use Jell-o in the cranberries, Jell-o contains gelatin which is made from animal bone so if you are a vegan you don’t really want to be going to the Jell-o.

And cranberries have natural pectin in them which will help them gel and also I will show you a couple of tricks if you want yours to be a little more like jelly like.

So to sweet this up I’m gonna add some maple syrup, you can use whatever type of sweetener you like and also the amount you use is up to you. Ok? You might wanna put a little bit more in if you like your cranberry sweeter I like mine just barely sweet then I’m gonna put some cinnamon in here. Also gives this some kind of flavor (and I guess I have to get the phone)

The last thing I am going to add in here is some nutmeg and Jenny, Phil’s mom uses a nutmeg grader with the whole nutmeg. If you haven’t seen this before this is pretty cool. It gives a lot more flavor than the ground nutmeg and either way nutmeg is a pretty powerful flavor so you don’t need much. That’s good!

Now what I am going to do is put a lid on here, put it in the stove, bring it to a boil and let it boil for about 20 minutes and you’ll start to see the cranberries break open and then they will start to Jell-o open. So this is about 5 minutes boiling. You can see the cranberries are starting to break open and I’m not sure if you can see in the screen or not but their seeds are coming in to the water and the seeds are what have the pectin in them so that is what is going to Jell-o your cranberries sauce.

Ok. Leave this on the heat, on minimum; just let it steamer for about another 10 minutes and you should see it starts to thicken up. So you want to get your cranberries to about this consistency. You can see that it had started to thickened while it’s hot it will not thicken completely. You have to set it aside, let it cool and it will start to thicken on its own. I have not added any thickener to this at all.

So like I said, this will gel on its own if you give it the time cook and let the natural pectin to develop, the less sugar that you add the more the pectin would be able to work.

And if you want to omit sugar and replace it with some fruit juice that is also a good way to go. If you need some help in getting your cranberries sauce to set if you are using more sugar or the pectin is just not working for you my two tricks are number one some ground flax seed, the flax will absorb the water and create a kinda jelly like consistency. You need only about a tablespoon of flax seed for this recipe to set it.

If you use more than that you might taste the flax a little bit, golden flax actually has less flavor than brown flax so if you use some of that it will be a lot more smoother taste.

And the other thing you can use is some agar powder. Agar is a type of sea vegetable that gets ground up into a very fine powder. It has no taste, don’t worry and you only need about a teaspoon for this recipe. Just stir it in after you take it off the stove and it will set perfectly exactly like you would have a Jell-O.

I think that is about it on the subject of the cranberry sauce. It is probably my favorite part of Christmas dinner so I put a lot of thought into it and I really enjoy making it. I hope you have fun with it. And you can find the recipe at healthyveganrecipe.net/Christmas.

I’m Heather, this is freshly served.