Skip to Main Content

Your Homemade Cranberry Sauce Sucks


Today is a day of thanks, of family, and of good food. Now please pass the cranberry sauce. No, not that homemade crap; the sliced up gel thing from the can.

I can’t stand homemade cranberry sauce. It’s either too tart or too sweet; it has massive, fibrous chunks of a very bitter berry floating around in it; and it’s so damn bright I feel like I’m eating an old world paint mixture. It’s like a big bowl of the nasty stuff film studios use when they blow up people’s heads in B-horror movies. Yeah, I’ll take the weird jiggly stuff out of the intentionally upside down can, thanks. It tastes just fine on my stuffing and the cook doesn’t have to add yet another “totally necessary” side dish to their long list of food to prepare in the kitchen, then complain to me about it.

I mean, cranberry sauce isn’t even a sauce really anyway. It’s more of a relish, and some folks in different parts of the country even call it as such. Sauces are supposed to be intricate and special, but cranberry sauce is like two ingredients. What? Am I supposed to be impressed that you cooked berries and sugar together on the stove top? Way to go! You really stirred there! Stop looking at me like that grandma, I’m not eating it... Okay, fine, I’ll have some, but I’m going to blog about it and be really snarky.

Now let’s talk quantity. There’s just way too much cranberry sauce, like, all the time. Even when I do use cranberry sauce, I just need a little tiny bit. Everybody just needs a little bit. Just enough to balance the savory flavor of the stuffing with some sweetness. But when people make it themselves there’s always a huge freakin’ bowl of it. Why? Who needs that much cranberry sauce? Now you just have a bunch of leftover cranberry sauce nobody is going to eat—awesome. Happy Thanksgiving everybody.