Make Perfect Cranberry Sauce in 5 Minutes | Cook Along with Anna Olson

Looking for a simple to make homemade cranberry sauce recipe for Thanksgiving? This quick and easy cranberry sauce with a twist of orange liqueur delivers the best balance of tart and sweet. Made with fresh cranberries and a citrus twist, this holiday side dish comes together in minutes—and you can easily skip the liqueur for a classic, traditional cranberry sauce.

In this video, I’ll show you step-by-step how to make cranberry sauce from scratch so your Thanksgiving dinner is stress-free. Whether you’re hosting the whole family or bringing a side to a Friendsgiving potluck, this recipe is a festive must-have!

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*• Recipe Information •*

Makes about 4 cups (1 L)
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes

You can refrigerate the cranberry sauce in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks, or freeze it for up to 3 months.

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*• Ingredients •*

4 cups (400 g) fresh or frozen cranberries
1 cup (250 mL) water
3/4 cup (150 g) granulated sugar
1/4 cup (60 mL) pure maple syrup
1 Mandarin orange, cut in half (or 1 Tbsp grated orange zest)
Pinch of ground cinnamon or cloves

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*• Directions •*

1. Place the cranberries, water, sugar, maple syrup, orange and cinnamon or clove maple syrup in a saucepan over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Reduce the heat to medium-low for a gentle simmer, and cook, uncovered, for about 15 minutes.

2. Remove the orange halves, transfer to a container and chill until ready to use.

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Excerpted from Anna Cooks by Anna Olson. Copyright © 2025 Anna Olson. Photographs by Janis Nicolay. Published by Appetite by Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Homemade cranberry sauce is a snap to make. You’ve got this. Especially when you can think about the simplicity of the ingredients in relationship to each other. I’m going to start with the cranberries. I love the sound that fresh cranberries make. Woo. Now, while I have the full recipe for this amount of cranberries below, I want you to think about any volume of cranberries you may have. So, for every 100 g of fresh cranberries, you’re going to want to add 1/4 cup, so 60 ml of water and 50 g or 1/4 cup of sugar. So, in the case of this recipe, and once you’ve got that ratio down, well, you can do the math, batch up or batch down as you want. You also want to think about those flavors you want to include. So, before I talk about those extra flavors, let’s add the water measured for this amount of cranberry sugar. And I’ve decided to split my sweetness between using granulated sugar and adding a little maple syrup. So, I replaced 50 g of the granulated sugar with 1/4 cup of maple syrup. Now, let’s talk flavor. If you didn’t want to use water and you wanted to add orange flavor, you could just simply replace it with orange juice. I do like the addition of orange. I have a little mandarin orange. So, you know what I’m going to do? Throw the whole thing in. Let me get this going over a medium heat. So, the zest will add beautiful aromatic flavor to the cranberry sauce. And then I’m giving it just a little sweet juice flavor. And I’ll make sure I pull this out before I serve the cranberry sauce. And I’m going for a little bit of cinnamon. Not too much. You could throw in a cinnamon stick. I’ve also used whole clove or a pinch of clove. I don’t want to make this taste like dessert. This is a condiment to serve next to the big turkey roast. And you just let this simmer. and bubble away. It takes about 15 minutes and the cranberries tell you when they’re done because they start popping. And with that, they release the natural pectins that are contained within it. You need to add the water otherwise you’re going to end up with too thick of a cranberry sauce that is too much like the stuff that comes out of the tin can. So, give this about 15 minutes over a medium heat. Simmer, bubble away, and you’re done. Easy as that. [Music] [Laughter] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] Something to note if this is your first time making cranberry sauce is that hot you’ll see it’s not set. So after the 15 minutes, I’ve just turned off the heat. It’s still very liquid. As the cranberry sauce cools, that’s when it starts to set up. So I’ll pull out my orange pieces now. And I made some suggestions earlier for flavoring. But you know what else would be good? A nice piece of ginger. Throw that in. Or if you’d rather use lemon instead of the orange, that makes perfect sense. Sometimes if you want to get fancy, you could even put in a splash of orange lure would be delicious or just straight brandy. Um really it’s anything that goes with cranberry will work here. So even just in the minute of taking it off the heat, I can feel how it’s thickening up. All right, I’m going to let this cool down, but let me show you what it looks like once it’s chilled. Here we go. You can really see how the cranberries have set up, but they hold their gloss absolutely beautifully and ready to serve. And this truly is like a preserve. So, cranberry sauce will keep in the fridge for a few weeks. You’ve got that beautiful tartness, some sweetness, the hint of maple, the orange, and now you have an ideal condiment to serve alongside your roasted turkeys. Happy holidays.