It takes less than 30 minutes to make your own cranberry sauce with fresh or frozen cranberries! And, you can literally make it with so many variations, like with oranges and orange juice, or Grand Marnier. Or try adding nuts and dried cranberries, mangoes, or apricots for a more chutney-like version. Even a cinnamon-cranberry port sauce is great! But …
But, our “go to” cranberry sauce, and the one we love best with our Lime-Basted BBQ Turkey, is this Jalapeno Lime Cranberry Sauce made with brown sugar, diced jalapeños, and freshly-squeezed lime juice. It’s such a fun diversion from traditional cranberry sauce and it’s so easy to make, you’ll wonder why in the world you ever bought canned cranberry sauce!
We use fresh or frozen cranberries for this sauce, and that is why we store up on fresh cranberries during the fall when they are prevalent in the markets and then freeze them for using the rest of the year. They freeze beautifully and once frozen they hold their shape really well and can be used for all sorts of baked goodies like the Cranberry Pumpkin Muffins we just posted on our blog!
Plus you can make homemade cranberry sauce or chutney whenever you have a craving for it! This cranberry sauce with jalapeno and lime juice goes especially well as a condiment for duck confit as well as steaks, in addition to turkey. We find that cranberry sauce lasts for up to a month in the refrigerator, and it’s really nice to always have some on hand!
If you can’t find fresh, you can make cranberry sauce with reconstituted dried cranberries during the spring and summer months when fresh cranberries are hard to find. One year, while my son was cleaning out the freezer, he accidentally threw out a bunch of fresh-frozen cranberries I’d been saving for summertime barbecued turkeys! I was so bummed, but luckily I was able to find some in the freezer section of my grocery store! That was the first time I’d been able to find them in the frozen fruit section, and boy, was I ever happy to see them! And so happy he took it upon himself to clean the freezer, too!
Jalapeno Lime Cranberry Sauce
Ingredients
Jalapeno Lime Cranberry Sauce
- 1 12-oz. bag of fresh cranberries
- 1 cup Light brown sugar
- 2 whole jalapeños stem and seeds removed and finely diced
- 1/4 cup fresh-squeezed lime juice
- 3/4 cup water
- 1 small jalapeño finely diced for garnish
Instructions
- Place all ingredients in a medium-sized saucepan.
- Bring to a boil and stir until everything is well-integrated and sugar is dissolved.
- Continue to boil for another 3-4 minutes, until the cranberry skins start to burst.
- Reduce heat to low and simmer for another 15-20 minutes, or until reduced and thickened, stirring occasionally.
- Remove from heat and cool completely. Sauce will thicken as it cooled. Store in an airtight container until ready to serve! Then garnish with finely diced jalapeños.
