By SARAH MOHAMED
The Way Ina Garten Makes Canned Cranberry Sauce Taste Fresh
Ina Garten always assures fans that it's okay to buy things from the store rather than being homemade. This includes canned cranberry sauce, which she enhances with citrus.
Garten prefers whole berry cranberry sauce, not the gelatinous kind. She likes Ocean Spray whole cranberry sauce, but any brand with whole berries should work fine.
To make it taste fresh and homemade, she warms up the canned cranberry sauce on the stove and then adds additional ingredients in two batches.
To the simmering cranberry sauce, Garten adds fresh orange zest and a little bit of orange juice. She then adds a firm, tart cubed Granny Smith apple for acid and texture.
After the ingredients have cooked together, the cranberry sauce gets taken off the heat, and Garten adds chopped nuts like walnuts or pecans and raisins for texture.
The nuts add a savory balance, and the raisins add a caramelized sweetness that complements the cranberries' tangy flavor. The result is between a sauce, relish, and chutney.