Holiday and Thanksgiving Cranberry Relish recipe. Fresh cranberries ground up with apples and orange. Great with turkey sandwiches.
One of my favorite things to make for Thanksgiving and the holidays is raw cranberry relish. There’s no cooking involved, just using a grinder or a food processor to grind up and mix together raw cranberries, tart green apples, a large seedless orange, and sugar.
It’s amazing how good it is! Great with roast turkey, or for leftovers on turkey sandwiches.
The sugar balances the natural tartness of the raw cranberries, and helps the mixture macerate, releasing juices that bind everything together. The recipe is as sweet as you want it to be. 2 cups of sugar will yield a very sweet result. 1 cup much less so.
How to make cranberry relish (video)
Cranberry Relish Recipe
- Prep time: 20 minutes
- Yield: Makes about 3 cups
You can use either a grinder (an old fashioned one or a KitchenAid attachment) or a food processor to grind up the relish. We prefer using a grinder to a food processor because a grinder does a better job smooshing the cranberries, orange, and apples together while it cuts them up. But either way will work.
Ingredients
- 2 cups rinsed raw cranberries
- 2 peeled and cored tart green apples, cut into thick slices
- 1 large, whole (peel ON) seedless orange, cut into sections
- 1 to 2 cups granulated sugar (depending on how sweet you would like your relish to be)
Method
1 Prepare your grinder: If you are using an old fashioned grinder, use the medium-sized grinder plate and set the grinder on the edge of a table with a large bowl or pan to catch the fruit mix as it is ground. Old fashioned grinders tend to leak juice down the grinder base, so you may want to set up a bowl underneath to catch the drips.
If you don’t have an old fashioned grinder, you can use the grinder attachment to a KitchenAid mixer, or you can use a food processor. If you use a food processor, be careful not to over-pulse! Or you’ll have mush instead of relish.
You can also just chop very finely by hand, but that’s difficult, especially with the cranberries.
2 Push fruit through grinder: Push the cranberries, orange sections, and apple slices through the grinder. Include the orange peel! Alternate the fruit as you push it through the grinder so that different fruits get ground together. If you do not have a grinder, pulse fruit in a food processor.
3 Add sugar: Stir in the sugar. (Start with less than a cup and keep adding 1/4 cups until you reach your desired level of sweetness.) Let sit at room temperature until the sugar dissolves, about 45 minutes. Store in the refrigerator until ready to use.
Notes:
Old fashioned cast iron grinders are easy to find and cheap to buy on ebay. Click here to find a meat grinder on eBay.
Links:
Spicy Cranberry Sauce with Pinot Noir
