Duff Goldman's Advice To Level Up Canned Cranberry Sauce

Cranberry sauce is a Thanksgiving favorite, but the bright bitterness and thick texture of canned cranberry sauce is versatile. It has a thick, ringed texture from the sauce can, which makes it good as a flat pâté of sorts, but if open up the can a different way, you can easily reshape it. This way, you can spread it neatly over your sandwich or besides your turkey and store-bought mashed potatoes with parmesan.

Chef Duff Goldman — best known for Food Network's "Ace of Cakes" and his bakery Charm City Cakes in Baltimore, Maryland — spoke to Tasting Table about his strategy for opening canned cranberry sauce. According to Goldman, he has what he calls a "ritual" for opening the can which takes advantage of canned sauce's smooth texture: "You take the top off, but then you have to poke a hole in the back, because it's the vacuum. You poke a hole, then it comes out, and it's so beautiful. It's that deep, dark pink color, and then when you slice it, it's such a visceral pleasure to cut it." Compared to chewy homemade sauce, you can work canned sauce into lots more dishes, especially if you spice it up.

Once your cranberry is out of the can, there's still plenty more ways you can mess around with it. Duff Goldman has a few ways he likes to prepare cranberry sauce himself, even if he sometimes prefers the simplicity of canned sauce. "I put some orange zest in there, I put a good amount of sugar in there, and a little bit of salt," he told Tasting Table. "I make it good, but the stuff in the can, it's just cranberries and sugar, there's nothing weird in there, and I like it. I like the texture of it. I like how smooth it is."

That orange zest — or orange juice or even an orange peel — can help a lot with flavoring canned sauce, especially if it's a sweeter orange like navel or valencia oranges. On their own, cranberries are very tart in flavor, which is why you need some kind of sugar or other sweetener to make it more palatable. For a little more kick, lemon juice works too, and cinnamon is a fairly common addition to spice up canned cranberry sauce. A spritz of sour lemon juice can work with many different fruits, and adds some extra bright flavors to cranberry sauce.

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