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Cranberry canning recipes are the best way to make the most of the short winter cranberry season. From cranberry sauce and jelly to chutney, salsa, and mustard, there are so many creative ways to stock your pantry shelf for the year.
Table of Contents
- Canning Whole Cranberries
- Cranberry Juice
- Cranberry Sauce
- Cranberry Jam
- Cranberry Jelly
- Cranberry Marmalade
- Cranberry Conserves
- Cranberry Pie Filling
- Cranberry Salsa
- Cranberry Ketchup
- Cranberry Butter and Applesauce
- Pickled Cranberries
- Cranberry Chutney
- Cranberry Mustard
- Other Ways to Preserve Cranberries
- Cranberry Canning Questions
- Winter Fruit Canning Recipes
Cranberries only show up here for a little while in late fall, usually November and December. I try to make the most of them while they are in season. I love that you can turn them into so many different pantry staples, from whole berries and cranberry juice to jelly, sauce, and pie filling.
I’m always looking for new cranberry recipes, because these tart berries work in sweet and savory preserves both. They bring plenty of natural pectin along with the flavor, which makes them a good partner for apples, pears, grapes, and oranges. They hold their own on the savory side too, in chutney, salsa, and mustard.
Freezing cranberries works, but I’d rather can them. Freezer space is always tight here, with garden produce, beef, and pork all competing for room. Winter power outages are common in Vermont too.
Canning also keeps the pectin, and that matters more with cranberries than with most fruit. After a week in the freezer they’ve lost about half of it. A jelly made from frozen berries won’t set without a box of pectin.
(These are all water bath canning recipes, so you won’t need a pressure canner. If you’re not familiar with water bath canning, I’d recommend reading my beginner’s guide to water bath canning before getting started.)
Canning Whole Cranberries
The simplest way to can cranberries is to put them up as whole fruits. Most berries can be canned in water, fruit juice or syrup, and cranberries are no exception.
They’ll sit on our pantry shelf right beside my home canned peaches, and they work just as well in homemade muffins.
I love using our home-canned whole cranberries in my mom’s cranberry orange bread recipe, and they work just as well as fresh or frozen fruit.
Cranberry Juice
Cranberry juice is another good pantry staple, especially if you like having unsweetened or lightly sweetened options on hand. It can be canned for shelf storage and used for drinking, mixing, or turning into jelly later.
This is also a nice way to preserve cranberries without making everything into spreads. A few jars of juice can go a long way in winter.
Cranberry Sauce
Probably the most popular cranberry canning recipe, homemade cranberry sauce is absolutely spectacular on your holiday table.
It’s best at room temperature anyway. Making it ahead and canning it saves real time on the day of the big meal.
It’s easy to make at home, either as whole berry or jellied cranberry sauce, or mix in other fruits to suit your taste.
(Be aware though, that if you’re using frozen cranberries you’ll need to make whole berry, as they don’t set quite right in the jellied version.)
- Cranberry Sauce (Jellied or Whole Berry)
- Cranberry Orange Sauce
- Jellied Cranberry Sauce
- Cranberry Rum Sauce
- Honey Maple Cranberry Sauce
Cranberry Jam
If you want to get technical, whole berry cranberry sauce is, in fact, cranberry jam. Just because you eat it on turkey, instead of on toast, doesn’t mean it’s not strictly speaking a jam.
Regular cranberry sauce just isn’t all that good on toast, though. These cranberry jams are.
They mix in other fruits, spices, and flavors that balance out the tart cranberries. While they’re still full of cranberry flavor, they’re nothing like the cranberry sauce you slather on your thanksgiving bird.
- Cranberry Apple Jam
- Cranberry Pear Jam
- Cranberry Orange Pear Jam
- Cranberry Grape Jam
- Cranberry Blueberry Jam
The other direction is more spice, or a softer berry to take the edge off. Christmas jam and spiced cranberry go heavy on cinnamon, cloves, and orange, and the raspberry ones round out the tartness instead.
Either way, they taste more like the holidays than like breakfast.
Cranberry Jelly
Cranberry jelly is a classic because the fruit gives you strong flavor and a reliable gel. You can make a clear cranberry jelly from juice, or go with a more traditional jellied cranberry sauce if you want that holiday texture.
It’s a bit like jam, but without the skins. A plain cranberry jelly sets on the fruit’s own pectin, since cranberries are rich in it and don’t need a box. Use fresh berries for that, though, because frozen ones lose about half their pectin in the first week. The cider version below adds pectin, since the apple juice dilutes what the cranberries bring.
If you like smooth spreads, this is one of the best cranberry canning options. It is great on toast, but it also works as a glaze for meat or stirred into sauces.
Cranberry Marmalade
Cranberries are a natural fit for marmalade because they pair so well with citrus. The tartness of the berries balances the sweetness, and the citrus peel adds that classic marmalade texture and flavor.
If you like a preserve with more bite than a standard jam, these are the ones. I put it on toast, biscuits, and scones, and it makes a good glaze for roasted meat.
Cranberry Conserves
A conserve is an old-fashioned preserve with a second fruit in it, and usually raisins or nuts as well. That gives you more texture than a plain jam. It’s the sort of thing that used to turn up on a holiday table.
I keep them for breakfast and for cheese boards. They go on toast, pancakes, or yogurt, and they hold up next to a roast just as well.
Cranberry Pie Filling
There aren’t many plain cranberry pie fillings, and the mixed ones are more useful anyway. Cranberries bring the tartness and enough body to hold a filling together, and they pair well with apples and pears.
You may not find many plain cranberry pie filling recipes, but mixed-fruit versions are often even more useful. They are great for pies, crisps, turnovers, and spooning over ice cream.
Cranberry Salsa
Cranberry salsa is sweet heat, and it’s the savory jar I reach for most. The cranberries gel as they cook, so the texture is a lot closer to a jam than a tomato salsa, even though it’s called salsa. (But it’s darn close to tomato jam, which is delicious too, and both are great on sandwiches.)
I keep a few jars for easy appetizers. Pour one over a block of cream cheese with crackers, and you’re done. But really, I think it’s best on leftover turkey sandwiches.
Cranberry Ketchup
Cranberry ketchup is an old-fashioned condiment, made with cranberries, vinegar, sugar, and warm spices. It sits somewhere between a fruit ketchup and a chutney, and the sweet-tart flavor suits roast meat.
It’s good with turkey, pork, meatloaf, and sausages. I put it on a sandwich when plain ketchup or mustard feels dull.
It’s also a way to use cranberries all winter rather than only at the holidays. The balsamic red pepper spread below is based on on the same sweet and sour idea, and tastes like a rich, savory jam.
Cranberry Butter and Applesauce
Most people go straight to traditional apple butter, but you can make a butter from almost any fruit. Cranberries are tart enough that they want a mellower fruit alongside, and both recipes here use apples for that.
Cranberries give up their color readily and dye everything in the batch, so a cranberry apple butter comes out a deep red instead of the brown you get from apples on their own.
That, plus the tartness cutting the sweetness, is most of the appeal.
Pickled Cranberries
While most people opt for sweet/tart cranberry sauce, why not play up the tart a bit more?
Pickled cranberries are still plenty sweet, but they have a zing from the natural tartness of cranberries combined with apple cider vinegar.
Spiced with warm spices like cinnamon, ginger, and star anise, they’re perfect as a dressing on your holiday table or adding intrigue to a charcuterie plate.
They also make a great topping on holiday leftover sandwiches!
Cranberry Chutney
Cranberry chutney is a great savory-sweet option, and there are some really good ones out there.
These recipes are a lot like pickled cranberries, but everything is finely diced. The spicing can vary, but it’s most often warm fall spices. You’ll usually find onions, as with most chutney, but you’ll also often find apples, raisins, orange, and other fruits to round out the flavor.
This is where you want to look if you want something for roasted meats, sandwiches, cheese plates, or a unique holiday gift.
Cranberry Mustard
The cranberries bring tartness and a little sweetness, and the mustard brings the savory kick. It works on a holiday plate and on an everyday sandwich.
I like it because it feels a bit more special than cranberry sauce, and it’s just as easy to use. It’s good with ham, turkey, pork, and sausages. It earns a spot on a cheese board too, and on the leftover sandwiches the next day.
Other Ways to Preserve Cranberries
Freezing cranberries is about as simple as it gets. Stem and sort them, wash and drain, then pack them straight into containers, or freeze them loose on a tray first if you’d rather. They keep about a year that way. Just know you’ll need added pectin if you jelly them later.
They dry well too, though they need chopping or at least pricking first. The skins are waxy, and a whole berry will sit there and steam.
And if you end up with more than any of that can absorb, they ferment into something worth keeping around.
Cranberry Canning Questions
The same few questions come up every November, mostly about frozen berries, cutting the sugar, and why the sauce set like a brick.
Short answers below. If yours isn’t here, leave it in the comments, and I’ll answer you there. That’s usually where the next round of these comes from.
Frozen works for almost everything on this page, and for most recipes you do not need to thaw them first. The one exception is jellied cranberry sauce, which does not set reliably from frozen fruit, so make whole berry sauce instead if frozen is what you have. Cranberries freeze so well straight in the bag that a lot of people buy extra in November and work through them all year.
No. Cranberries are one of the most acidic fruits there is, so every canning recipe here is water bath canned. That covers the sauces, jams, jellies, chutneys, salsa, ketchup, and mustard alike. The acidity is also why cranberries are forgiving to work with, and why they help carry lower-acid fruit like pears and apples in mixed recipes.
Because cranberries carry a lot of natural pectin, more than almost anything else you would put in a jar. A sauce that sets harder than you wanted is doing exactly what the fruit wants to do. Cook it a shorter time, add a little more liquid, or mix in a lower-pectin fruit. The same trait is what lets a plain cranberry jelly set with no added pectin at all.
It depends where. In jams and jellies set with regular pectin, the sugar is part of the gel, and cutting it gives you syrup instead. In sauces, whole berries and juice you have much more room. If you want a lower sugar version of a jam, start from a recipe written for low sugar pectin rather than reducing the sugar in a standard one.
Fresh cranberries show up in stores around late October and are usually gone by the end of December, which is the shortest window of any fruit worth canning. Buy more than you think you need while they are on the shelf. They hold in the fridge for a couple of months and in the freezer for a year, so there is no rush to can them all the week you buy them.
Winter Fruit Canning Recipes
Cranberries land in the narrowest window of the canning year. They arrive right when the garden is finished, and I’d otherwise have the canner put away. That’s half of why I think they’re worth the trouble.
The rest of the winter fruit comes in on the same schedule or just after. You can cover several of these in one December afternoon.
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It all sounds delicious and the start of a great plan! Thank you!
You’re quite welcome!
Hi Ashley!
I have been a follower for some time.. i found you on Pinterest years ago and subscribed to your emails.
I appreciate all the wisdom and recipes you share with us =)
They have been very helpful and inspiring.
I wanted to ask a question… The pics on this page have a “P Save” button, when scrolled over them… if clicked on, it will open the Pinterest page where i can pin your blogpost to any of my boards, which i do, for future reference.
Unfortunately, Pinterest has decided that me Pinning this page, in particular the last picture that is obviously edited for Pinterest (the one that reads 12+ Cranberry Canning Recipes) is infringing on your copyright.
Is this true? Do you not want us to pin your blogposts under our personal Pinterest boards for future reference? If so, it would be helpful if the “P Save” buttons were not on the Pictures, bc the messaging is confusing.
If this is incorrect and you have no problem with us pinning your blogposts for future reference, then please let Pinterest know… bc they are deactivating pins alleging “plausible claim of infringement”, but it seems ridiculous that we now can’t use Pinterest for what it was created and intended for in the first place: A visual bookmark of things we like that we find online, or repining things we find within Pinterest.
I’m just wondering if you are ok with them deactivating the pins that contain links to your blog. If so, you can ignore this message. If not, i think Pinterest is doing you a disservice.
I placed a complaint trying to reverse this by explaining your webpage has a P Save button on the particular picture linking to pin it on pinterest, but they are stubborn, and probably they don’t know or understand how to interpret these copyright claims.
Let me know if you need more info, in case you wish to communicate with Pinterst about the matter… if not, don’t worry, just ignore me… i know you have a busy life!
Thank you for reading.
Hi Erika!
Yes, pinterest is REALLY frustrating for creators right now. I do, of course, always want people to pin my stuff and save it to their boards. Always!
At the moment, pinterest is plagued by AI content and spam, which is really frustrating users, and they’re doing a “cleanup” where they try to delete that content, but in the process they are scraping up lots of real content. (Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as they say.). THey’re also sending out messages making it sound like it’s the creators (ie. me) not wanting you to pin posts, which isn’t the case.
It’s more complicated than I can reasonably go into, but yes, I am frustrated with them, and I am trying to work through their systems to ensure that you can still pin my content without issue…but it’s a work in progress. It’s not just me, it’s a lot of creators right now, and plenty of bloggers have just given up on them and removed their “pin it” buttons altogether in protest.
In the meantime, please do continue pinning things. If they take down a pin, you can re-pin it, that’s fine. I’m sorry you have to go through it, it’s frustrating, but they’re making strange decisions with their platform right now and no one’s happy with it.
Thank you for being patient with a system that’s clearly a kerfuffel right now. And, I’m so happy you’re enjoying my posts!
-Ashley
I just made the cranberry mustard recipe yesterday. I brushed it on some pork chops and baked them and it was heavenly!! Highly recommend trying out this recipe!!!
Lovely!
In the Cranberry Maple butter recipe, you say ‘one can of Maple Syrup’, what the heck is that in real measurements? Tomato paste can, tuna can, soup can? Help.
The cranberry maple butter recipe isn’t on my site, it’s a friend of mine’s at The View from Great Island. I just followed the link and it looks like she’s corrected it, and now it says “1 cup maple syrup”. Here’s the link to her corrected recipe: https://theviewfromgreatisland.com/maple-cranberry-butter-recipe/
Have you tried making lingon berry juice to can like you do the cranberries (pouring boiling water over them in the jar with sugar and letting them sit)?
I haven’t, but I bet it’d be delicious!
this comment is a few years old, however, yes linong berries in a jam or juice or chutney are fantastic.
Thank you for this list! I have 20 pounds of cranberries to work thru. I’ve already made 8 quarts of juice (with 10lbs) and will likely make a few more quarts of juice with the berries left, but the maple-cranberry butter looks really nice to add to the mix.
Have you ever made cranberry pepper jam? I canned peach jalapeños jam this summer, and it was spectacular! I was gifted 10 lbs of fresh Wisconsin cranberries, and I’d love to make cranberry pepper jam. I’m looking for a recipe.
Thanks!
Oh wow, that sounds really amazing. I haven’t made a cranberry pepper jam, but I imagine it might be quite a bit like this recipe for cranberry salsa? https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_salsa/spicy_cranberry_salsa.html
The cranberries gel when cooked, so it comes out like a jam in texture even though it’s called salsa.
Since I prefer honey to sugar, did you ever try making syrup with honey? Normally I substitute 1 part of white sugar with 3/4 of honey when making e.g. jam. What I am aiming at is your extra medium syrup for my canned cranberries. Do you think this would turn out nice? Thank you very much,
Sabine
That should work out perfectly for canned cranberries. About 3/4 cup of maple in place of sugar is just what you want to do. Enjoy!