Reduced Sugar Cranberry Sauce

Ditch the canned stuff and make this homemade reduced sugar cranberry sauce instead! It is so simple to make and goes perfectly with your Thanksgiving turkey! (gluten-free, vegan, nut-free)

For as long as I can remember, we have never had canned cranberry sauce at our family’s Thanksgiving. Never.

And why should we when homemade cranberry sauce is so simple to make? The original recipe you’ll find on most bags of fresh cranberries calls for only 3 ingredients: cranberries, water and sugar. That’s it! That’s the recipe we’ve always used at our Thanksgiving feast. And that simple recipe has always been a thousand times better than the congealed junk that flops out of the can. (Sorry if the can is your jam, no judgement here.)

Since I do like to actually taste the cranberries in cranberry sauce, I decided to make a reduced sugar cranberry sauce with just as much flavor as the full-sugar kind. It only takes one extra ingredient that you probably already have lying around in your kitchen, and it takes no extra time. What could be easier?

If you haven’t guessed already, that extra ingredient is orange juice. Groundbreaking, I know. Bottled or freshly squeezed orange juice, it doesn’t matter in this cranberry sauce recipe. Orange juice enhances the flavor of fresh cranberries while naturally sweetening the sauce, so you get more flavor than just white sugar without an overbearing tartness you would get from cutting the sugar alone.

Seriously, this reduced sugar cranberry sauce is ridiculously easy, and it’s the perfect complement to that turkey you’ve been slaving over for days. If you’ve never made homemade cranberry sauce before, give this recipe a try. You’ll wonder why you didn’t try it sooner, and I promise you’ll never go back to the canned stuff again!

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