Instant Pot Spiced Cranberry Sauce
A delightfully spiced (not spicy hot!) cranberry sauce fit to serve at your most elegant -- or laid-back -- Thanksgiving dinner. The perfect sweet-tart side dish to complement a carb coma meal. See notes for doubling the recipe for a crowd.
Servings 4
Calories 210kcal
Ingredients
- 12 ounce bag fresh cranberries
- 1/2-3/4 cup sugar*
- 1 orange
- 2 pods star anise
- 1 heaping tablespoon minced candied ginger
- 2 tablespoons maple syrup
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 pinch ground cardamom**
- 1 pinch fine sea salt
Instructions
- Clean and pick over the cranberries for debris and damaged berries.
- Zest the orange, and then squeeze all of the juice. You'll need two teaspoons of zest and you'll squeeze about 1/2 cup of juice.
- Add all of the ingredients to the inner pot of your Instant Pot and stir to mix everything well.
- Close the lid and seal the vent.
- Set unit to pressure cook for 2 minutes***. When finished, let natural release for 10 minutes. If the valve hasn't dropped (it probably won't have), quick release the vent, taking care to protect yourself from the steam.
- Open the lid away from you, watching out for the drips from the lid.
- Find and discard the star anise pods.
- Give the cranberry sauce a good stir.
- Decide what kind of texture you want: for a smoother sauce, use a potato masher to smoosh the cranberries. Note that the sauce will be rather loose at this point.
- Taste the sauce (let it cool on a spoon - it'll be hot!). If it's not quite sweet enough, you can add another tablespoon of sugar or maple syrup while the sauce still hot.
- Let the sauce cool in the Instant Pot (it will continue cooking and begin gelling).
- Transfer to a bowl, and store in the refrigerator for up to 14 days, or freeze for 2 months. It will finish setting up during its chill time.
Notes
* The typical cranberry sauce recipe uses up to 1 cup of sugar. One advantage of bold spices is that you don't need to use as much sugar. However, I wouldn't go lower than 1/2 cup, unless everyone at the meal loves tart. I prefer 3/4 cup.
** You can also take whole green cardamom pods, cut them open, and extract and grind the seeds inside. So fragrant! Use three or four pods.
*** If you're using a 6 or 8 quart Instant Pot, they'll take longer to come up to pressure than the 3 quart, which I used for this recipe, simply because of their larger volume. That means you'll need less actual cook time. I would suggest cooking for 1 minute, and then starting the quick release after 8 minutes of natural release.
To double the recipe: to make this cranberry sauce for a crowd, double the amount of cranberries, sugar, and orange juice, but increase the remaining spices only by about 75%. They're quite bold, and straight up doubling could be overpowering in the recipe.
Nutrition
Calories: 210kcal