Samin Nosrat’s Trick for the Best Cranberry Sauce

Samin Nosrat’s cooking advice is all about balance.

As the author of the James Beard Award-winning and New York Times best-selling cookbook “Salt Fat Acid Heat” and host of the Netflix series by the same name, Nosrat has blessed many of us with a better understanding of how to manipulate and combine the fundamental flavors of food. So when she gives advice on how to improve a Thanksgiving spread, I am all ears.

This week on the popular cooking and recipe development-focused podcast “The Recipe with Kenji and Deb,” its eponymous hosts, J. Kenji López-Alt and Deb Perelman, decided to take a break from recording and instead re-aired an episode of one of my all-time favorite podcasts, “Home Cooking” from Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway. First recorded in November of 2020, the episode is as relevant today as it was then because she’s diving into listeners’ common Thanksgiving conundrums — including three easy strategies for improving cranberry sauce.

Here are the takeaways.

Add two specific ingredients

There’s one fruit you’ll always find in Samin Nosrat’s cranberry sauce — besides the cranberries, of course — and that’s quince. As the Iranian-American author describes it, “Quince is a really lovely fruit that I love working into things at this time of year, and I find that cranberry and quince are a lovely pairing.”

She also explains that quince has a beautiful fragrance and is closely related to the apple. The fruit, which looks like a yellow, bumpy apple, is much more tart in flavor — so you have to either cook it with a lot of sugar or in wine to mellow it out.

When it comes to cranberry sauce, tartness is a good thing, and since you’re already cooking the berries with plenty of sugar it’s easy to add quince into the mix. Unlike cranberries, which will burst and start to almost melt into each other as they heat up, quince provides more texture to the sauce once cooked — in the same way an apple would. Nosrat also notes that quince is a classic Iranian ingredient, so it helps her bring more Persian flavors to her Thanksgiving table.

One other thing Nosrat always uses in her cranberry sauce? A bay leaf. Do not underestimate the subtle power of this herb. Many people assume that these leaves don’t impart much flavor, but their herbaceous and peppery notes will give your cranberry sauce a little extra oomph without overpowering it. Just make sure you let the bay leaf simmer in the sauce for a while.

Make sure your sauce is acidic

A Thanksgiving spread is full of rich, starchy, salty food, which is why we love it. But that also means — as Nosrat points out — that “on a typical Thanksgiving table, the only source of acidity is cranberry sauce. And so I really like that to be very bright, very acidic.”

In other words, you need a tart condiment to successfully cut through and balance everything out. This is why cranberry sauce has become a staple part of the holiday — we need it to serve a purpose, and an overly sweet version won’t do the job quite as well.

Because cranberry sauce is basically a jam — a combination of fruit, water, and sugar — you can always control how acidic it is by manipulating the quantities of those ingredients. Too sweet? Add a little more water and cranberries. Too tart? You need more sugar. If you typically opt for a very sugary, jammy cranberry sauce, I recommend trying one that’s a little more loose and tart, like Nosrat’s; you’ll be surprised at how much it can bring a whole plate together.

Yes, you can improve a canned cranberry sauce

Did someone show up with only a can of cranberry sauce? Don’t worry, you can salvage it. As Nosrat explains, the problem with canned cranberry sauce is that it doesn’t cut through all the rich foods it’s paired with — it’s way too sweet (this is why it holds its jelly-like texture) and not acidic enough. To make it better, the cookbook author says you should heat the sauce and add a little water. The liquid will loosen it up, so it isn’t jiggly, and help dilute the high volume of sugar.

Next, add the juice and zest of an orange to give it even more brightness. From there, incorporate whatever appropriate ingredients you have on hand. You can simmer a cinnamon stick, juniper berries, or cardamom pod along with the sauce — but Nosrat suggests only using one of them, not all three, to keep the flavor profile simple. And if you have a source of heat like cayenne pepper or chipotle chile powder, a dash of spice always makes a condiment better.