Recipe: Fermented Cranberry Orange Relish

Farm & Garden

Recipe: Fermented Cranberry Orange Relish

by Stephanie Thurow - November 10, 2023

I love preserving with all sorts of fruits and vegetables, but one of my very favorite ingredients to preserve with is cranberries. Being Minnesotan, we are fortunate to live right next to the biggest cranberry producer in the country: Wisconsin. Each fall, I buy a big box of fresh whole cranberries to preserve in various ways.

Last year I shared a delicious cranberry shrub recipe and a recipe for cranberry juice here on Hobby Farms. This year I’m going to share a fermented cranberry relish recipe that I hope you’ll enjoy as much as our family does. It’s been a staple at our Thanksgiving table for years.

Yield: 1 pint jar

Ingredients

3 cups whole cranberries
1/2 tsp. organic orange zest
2 tsp. fresh squeezed orange juice
2 tsp. raw honey

Instructions

Pick through the cranberries and discard any damaged, soft or unripe berries (pink- or green-colored). Rinse thoroughly and strain out water.

Use a food processor to chop the cranberries. It only takes 2 to 3 seconds.

Transfer berries into a clean pint jar and add in orange zest, juice, and honey. Mix together well. Use a canning jar lid and ring to tightly shut the jar to keep the air out.

fermented cranberries cranberry relish

Fermentation

Ferment at room temperature, out of direct sunlight. Check on the ferment once a day by removing the lid and stirring the cranberry mixture, patting it back down, placing the lid back on, and tightly closing. This is a 3-day ferment.

Refrigerate after fermentation is complete. This fermented cranberry relish is best if enjoyed within 2 weeks.

This recipe has been shared from Stephanie Thurow’s Can It & Ferment It with permission of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Stephanie is an author, certified master food preserver, food preservation instructor and freelance writer that lives in Minnesota. Her pastimes include: cooking-from-scratch, canning, fermenting, crafting, hand stamping metal jewelry, organic gardening, photography, chicken keeping, fishing, traveling and urban homesteading. She also enjoys laughing, dancing and visiting with family and friends. She has had a die-hard love of kimchi since she was a toddler, which ultimately lead to her interest in fermentation. She loves to garden and lives with her family, pets and flock of hens on her urban homestead near Minneapolis, MN.