If you don't like cranberries or cranberry sauce, you should be sodomized by a hundred violent criminals, be disfigured and covered in feces and paraded around town in public humiliation, be tortured daily for three months, rolled up in fat-soaked pelts and set on by ravenous wild animals, have your entire extended family disinherited and tossed into lifelong sentences in labor camps, and your corpse left to hang from poles in public until it becomes a skeletal wind chime. That's how much I like cranberries; my aunt would have to pry the bowl of it out of my hands every Thanksgiving. This is a prototype recipe I've been wanting to work on for years:
Today's Speicimen
Ingredients
- 12 oz. whole cranberries
- 1 cup cold water
- ⅞ cup cane sugar
- 1 tsp. lemon zest
- 1 tsp. ground fresh ginger
- ½ tsp. ground cinnamon
- ½ tsp. ground nutmeg
- 6 whole cloves
Directions
- Add everything but the cranberries, lemon zest, ginger, and cloves to a small pot on medium heat.
- When the mixture comes to a boil add the cranberries, lemon zest, ginger, and cloves and stir while reducing the temperature to low.
- Keep stirring the sauce until it begins to simmer, then cover and let cook for thirty minutes.
- Turn the temperature off and leave the sauce to sit for an hour to cool down and allow the cloves to infuse into it before serving or transferring to the fridge for storage.
Next Time in the Lab
That turned out pretty well! Not only that, but I learned a way to zest without using a zester or having to wrestle with a paring knife. All you do is cover a regular stand-up grater with plastic wrap or (if you're ghetto) a plastic bag and rub the fruit on the plastic covering the smallest perforations. This prevents the teeth of the perforations from tearing into the pith and causes most of the zest to either grate off or cling to the plastic. I used the same technique with the ginger to get a good fine mush. Still, as good as it was, I would do a couple things differently next time:
- Double the lemon zest and ginger to two teaspoons each and see if they overpower the cranberry flavor
- Add a quarter teaspoon of cardamon
- Reduce the number of cloves down to four
