How to Make Healthy Cranberry Sauce without Refined Sugar

Cranberry sauce is a holiday staple that, delicious as it is, can be laden with sugar. Learn how to sweeten your cranberry sauce naturally with orange, apple, and a little bit of honey for a healthy cranberry sauce that is better for you and, dare I say, even tastier than the original. You will love this easy cranberry sauce!

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Cranberry sauce was the first Thanksgiving dish I ever made. Standing on a chair by the stove on the afternoon before Thanksgiving, when school had let out early, I stirred the water, sugar, and cranberries together. My mother could have done it more easily without my “help”, no doubt.

We used the recipe on the back of the cranberry package. It turned out perfectly, as it always did.

Years later, I began to look askance at the amount of sugar in cranberry sauce. Sure, we eat it only at Thanksgiving, and maybe Christmas, but we also were having a number of other sugary treats– pie, stuffing, mashed potatoes… No wonder everyone drags after Thanksgiving dinner!

I began experimenting, reading recipes, and trying this and that. It turns out that there are a lot of ways to sweeten cranberries without a lot of sugar! They can be as good as or even better than the recipe on the cranberry bag. Which is pretty good itself. This recipe has only 4 ingredients– fruits and honey!

Cranberries and the First American Thanksgiving

Cranberry sauce became a traditional Thanksgiving dish because we imagine that cranberries were on the menu at the first Thanksgiving. They grow in the Plymouth Bay area, and both natives and Pilgrims made use of them.

However, historians doubt that the Pilgrim ladies were boiling up any cranberry sauce because they probably lacked sugar. They had been out there for a good while without resupply, and, you remember, the year had been pretty grim. They were thanking God for pulling them through!

The survivors relied on the produce of the area, with the help of their neighbors. There may have been some local produce on the menu along with corn, venison, waterfowl, and seafood.

If they ate cranberries, they might have been mixed with dried meat in the form of pemmican. Not sweet, and not sauce. The first Thanksgiving may have been rather savory and meat-inclined.

Cranberry Sauce Becomes a Thing

We don’t know precisely when cooks began making cranberries into sauce. Cranberry sauce is documented 50 years after the first Thanksgiving. Presumably, sugar would have been much more readily available by then. When Americans formalized the modern tradition of Thanksgiving in 1863, cranberry sauce was an early staple on the menu.

General Ulysses S. Grant even ordered it for his troops’ Thanksgiving meal in 1864! Presumably, General Grant was not devoting himself to breaking new culinary ground in the middle of the Civil War, so cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving dinners may have been somewhat traditional by then.

Cranberries have continued to appear in American cooking. Pies, breads, cookies, jams, dried cranberries atop salads or in trail mix, juice… Maybe we haven’t changed so very much from those cooks and their guests at the first Thanksgiving who used cranberries creatively with whatever else they had available. We just developed a sweet tooth about them!

Actually, cranberry cultivation is a fun little rabbit trail to follow. If you don’t know much about it, check out this article.

How to Make Cranberry Sauce without Refined Sugar

This healthy cranberry sauce is bright and fruity. Keep reading for ideas on changing the flavor in different ways. I can’t decide which one I like best!

Grated apple does a lot of work in this recipe. The apple adds volume to the sauce, and it contributes most of the sweetness. It doesn’t add much flavor, though.

Because we are relying on the apple to sweeten those tart cranberries, start with a sweet apple. Gala, pink lady, Fuji, and others will work fine.

You don’t have to peel the apples. I peel them because I want them to disappear into the sauce as it cooks. You can leave the peels on if you prefer.

In a saucepan, heat the grated apple over very low heat. Add the juice of an orange and the cranberries. You can also add the orange zest. As the mixture heats, the apples will release liquid, and the cranberries will do the same once they begin to burst open. Once there is plenty of liquid in the pot, you can turn the heat up to medium.

There isn’t much juice in the fresh fruits– keep stirring with low heat until the juice appears!

You want to boil the sauce long enough that the apple partially disintegrates. 10-15 minutes will be enough. When the cranberries have popped, the sauce is turning red, and the apples aren’t very prominent, turn the heat off and let the mixture begin to cool.

Taste the mixture when it is still warm and add raw honey to sweeten it to your taste. I usually find that 1/4 cup is about right, but you can use more or less. Your taste, the sweetness and exact amount of the apple, and the sweetness and amount of the orange juice will all affect the amount of honey you need.

You could use maple syrup in place of honey, but you may need a little more and you will taste the maple flavor, which you may or may not prefer.

Scoop your cranberry sauce into a pretty serving dish, cover, and refrigerate until ready to serve. You will need to allow a couple of hours for it to gel. Cranberries gel once they are cooked enough to pop, and apples help. You don’t need sugar for this process to happen.

Questions and Answers

Is this recipe GAPS friendly?

It is! Assuming you are tolerating the ingredients well, you will be fine. Stick with honey, and keep it as low an amount as you can.

What if I don’t want to use orange?

It isn’t necessary. Leave it out and maybe put a tablespoon of water in the saucepan at the beginning so there is some liquid to prevent the cranberries from burning or sticking to the pan before the apple and cranberries begin releasing their own liquid. The orange is not needed to make the recipe work!

What if I can’t use apple?

This recipe relies on apple mainly for sweetness. You could try it with a chopped pear, which is even sweeter, but I haven’t done it. You could leave the apple out; in that case you will need to add more honey to sweeten. You will also end up with less cranberry sauce.

Do I have to use honey?

Not really. You could use maple syrup or some other sugar. You might even do fine with a sugar substitute, though I have not tried that. Honey is sweeter than other sugars, so you may need a little more if you use one of them.

The recipe will work without any sweetener beyond the apple and the orange juice. It will be quite tart, though. It is a matter of your taste!

Make Cranberry Sauce Your Way!

You can change the flavor profile in different ways. Much as I love the cranberry-orange flavor, there are other additions that are just wonderful, including:

• freshly grated ginger– start with a teaspoon to be sure you like it. I don’t like more than a tablespoon; it starts to taste like soap. Fresh ginger combines wonderfully with orange and cranberry for an even brighter, zestier flavor! Cook it along with the sauce. Or try a little dried, ground ginger.
• a bit of cinnamon or cloves– half a teaspoon is about right for a warmer, moodier flavor
• cardamom– be careful not to overdo cardamom– start with 1/4 teaspoon! Cardamom combines nicely with ginger.
• a teaspoon of vanilla extract
• if you want a more citrus-y flavor, try lemon zest along with the orange. You could add lemon juice, but of course it will make the sauce more sour.

How to Serve Cranberry Sauce

• as a condiment alongside your Thanksgiving turkey, of course!
• alongside other wintertime dishes in the same way as turkey– we have it with Swedish meatballs sometimes if we don’t have lingonberries. It isn’t the same, but it is similar– the poor man’s lingonberry preserves!
• top pancakes or waffles with cranberry sauce for a zippy change from syrup
• spread over toast like jam
• stir into plain yogurt for a zesty, fruit-flavored yogurt
• make into a dessert fluff by stirring into whipped cream

Want more cranberry recipes? Try fermented cranberry relish for gut health benefits!

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