The Unexpected Ingredient That Makes Canned Cranberry Sauce Taste Homemade

Cranberry sauce is one of those Thanksgiving sides that people have strong opinions about. Either it’s a must-have at your Turkey Day table, or you could take it or leave it until it comes time to make your leftover turkey sandwich—in which case, cranberry sauce is essential. 

Making cranberry sauce from scratch isn’t actually hard—you might remember that it was the one task Monica delegated to Chandler in Friends with the quip “It’s easy to make and no one really cares about it!” However, just because it’s easy to do, doesn’t mean you actually want to stand over the stove babysitting your cranberries until they start to pop. 

Time and stove-top space are essential on Thanksgiving, so anything that can free us up is a plus in our book. Enter canned cranberry sauce.

Say what you want about canned cranberry sauce, but it gets the tart, yet sweet job done—especially for home cooks who really can’t be bothered to make their own side when the canned stuff tastes nearly identical. 

Canned cranberry sauce is sold in two varieties: whole-berry cranberry sauce and jellied cranberry sauce. A lot of people who are looking to pass their cranberries off as homemade will likely buy the whole-berry cranberry sauce, dump it into a fancy-looking bowl, and call it a day, while some home cooks might spruce it up a bit with rosemary or citrus.

On the other hand, people who buy the jellied cranberry sauce typically serve it the traditional way: sliced. What many might not realize, however, is that you can jazz up your jellied cranberry sauce in the same way you can whole-berry cranberry sauce. Here’s how.

How To Make Jellied Cranberry Sauce Taste Homemade

Instead of just slicing up the cranberry sauce into jellied disks and calling it a day, you can add a flavorful boost to your canned cranberry sauce with just a few additional ingredients. Hormel Foods, the mind behind Thanksgiving expert brand and Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade sponsor Jennie-O, has a canned cranberry sauce recipe that enhances the sauce with “nuanced flavors” and gives it “dimension.” 

To upgrade your canned cran, try topping the slices with similar ingredients you’d use in homemade cranberry sauce, like oranges or pomegranate seeds. The fruity flavors will add brightness, but an unexpected ingredient will add depth: olive oil. 

Hormel Foods’ chef recommends drizzling the cranberry sauce slices with olive oil and adding a sprinkle of salt and Italian parsley to add an earthy flavor to the otherwise sweet sauce. Similar to adding rosemary to the sauce, olive oil and Italian parsley will balance out the tartness and add a complexity that you wouldn’t expect from the gelatin-like sauce.

You don’t want to overdo it on the savory, though, so just a little drizzle of olive oil, sprinkle of salt, and a few Italian parsley leaves will bring the perfect balance. Then, when you add it to your plate or turkey sandwich, make sure you get a slice that has a little bit of everything with the orange slices and pomegranate seeds, too.

Not only will the sliced cranberry sauce look beautiful, but it will also taste different from anything you’ve served at Thanksgiving before.