Is Homemade Cranberry Sauce Really Worth It?
Elizabeth Gunnison
The fourth Thursday of November brings with it no shortage of specific food cravings. When else during the year do whole turkeys, stuffing, or yams with marshmallows make appearances at your dinner table? Add to that list cranberry sauce, without which no Thanksgiving spread is complete. And yet oddly, on a holiday that's all about home cooking, cranberry sauce is the only aspect of my Thanksgiving dinner that always comes from a can. What gives? We eat cranberry sauce but once a year, so why shouldn't it get the homemade treatment, too? We tested canned versus homemade jellied cranberry sauce to find out if the effort is really worth it.
The Contenders: Ocean Spray Jellied Cranberry Sauce vs. Gourmet's Jellied Cranberry Sauce
Cranberries are one of the few fruits native to North America, and they've been part of the Thanksgiving tradition since the Pilgrims' first dinner. The sauce version came into cookbooks at least as early as 1840. There's a long historical precedent for pairing fruits with meat (think Duck a L'Orange, fish with lemon, pork and apples, lamb and apricots), but cranberry sauce is said to have first been served alongside Thanksgiving turkey by General Ulysses S. Grant during the siege of Petersburg in 1864. Cranberry sauce was first commercially canned in 1912. America never looked back.
Relative Costs: Homemade is more than twice as expensive as store-bought. I paid $1.89 for a 1 1/2 cup can of cranberry sauce, or $1.26 per cup; Ingredients for 3 1/2 cups of homemade cranberry sauce came to $10.25, or $2.93 per cup.
Relative Healthfulness: Slight edge to homemade. Ocean Spray's sauce is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, whereas homemade uses cane sugar.
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Time Commitment: I spent an hour making the homemade cranberry sauce. Prep for the store-bought one, for those unfamiliar, goes: open can, pour onto serving plate, eat.
Leftovers Potential: Either of the sauces can be refrigerated for about two weeks. What The Testers Said First let me introduce our panel.
THE HEALTH NUT: A delicate eater, the health nut is calorie conscious but also likes to eat well
THE FOODIE: Calorie agnostic, our foodie judge has a sophisticated palate and a love of cooking
THE DUDE: Ambivalent toward food trends and health concerns, this guy just wants to be fed when he's hungry
THE KID: Between ages of 9 and 12 years old, not jaded, typically not into strong flavors
Testers sampled both cranberry sauces blind, and with turkey. Everyone found the biggest difference between the two to be texture; the homemade sauce had a distinct Jell-O springiness.
The Health Nut: Store-bought. "The homemade's flavor is a little more mild and the texture more gelatinous, which isn't what I'm looking for in a cranberry sauce."
|The Foodie: Store-bought. "How can you beat the tangy, sweet flavor of store-bought cranberry sauce? It's a holiday classic."
The Kid: Homemade. "It's just like Jell-O." The Dude: Store-bought. "Seeing that cylinder of cranberry sauce with the lines still on it from the can just makes me so happy."
The Verdict: Fake It. Don't fix it if it ain't broke. Granted, the homemade recipe was jellied-not a relish or chutney that brings more complex flavor and texture to the jewel-red berry. But the truth is, jellied cranberry sauce out of the can is a Thanksgiving classic, with a tangy, fruity flavor and pleasing texture that seems to pair perfectly with rich holiday fare. Spending an hour of your precious Thanksgiving prep time making your own just isn't worth it.
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