(Editor’s note: THE HOLIDAYS ARE COMING!!! And Carrie Brown’s got you covered.
No, you don’t have to sit and mournfully watch as others pile their plates with your former non-keto favorites. Carrie loving crafted her holiday cookbook, Keto for the Holidays, with ketonians especially in mind, so that you can still enjoy many old- and new!- holiday classics without the guilt. In this series, I will be reviewing some choice holiday recipes that I plan on using at my own table this season. Stay tuned for more….)
Anything with fruit in is usually a problem on keto. Most fruit itself tends to be a bit too sweet for keto compliance, and so traditional holiday fruit dishes, like cranberry sauce, are pretty much out.
Enter Carrie Brown.
You can have cranberry sauce on your holiday table. Not only can you have it, it’s going to be the best cranberry sauce you’ve ever had in your life. I know, because I made it for Thanksgiving and it wasn’t just a hit, it was THE. BEST. THING. on my table. And we had a lot of good food, so that’s saying something. It was also insanely easy to make.
Now, Carrie has two cranberry sauce recipes in her book: one is a chunky, compote-style sauce, and the other is the classic jelled sauce like what you get out of the cans. Since the canned stuff is my daughter’s favorite, that’s what I made.
I’m going to say right up front, I’ve never been a big cranberry sauce person. I’ve made some cranberry orange stuff before, but it’s always been kind of meh. I’m dead serious when I say the only reason I bothered to make it for Thanksgiving is because my daughter saw the recipe in Carrie’s holiday book and literally begged me to make it for her. So, when I tell you that it’s amazingly awesome and was pretty much everyone’s favorite dish (and that includes my picky son who normally only eats ham and a roll at our holiday dinners), you know I’m not kidding around or blowing smoke.
I wore my apron. Grab yours here: https://www.zazzle.com/s/ketovangelist
I think the best part about making this dish was that it is so stunningly simple. It only requires a few ingredients, and it depends on the natural pectin already present in cranberries for the jellying part, so there’s no fiddling around with trying to evenly dissolve gelatin without it clumping and such. Once again, I highly recommend following Carrie’s instructions pretty exactly here, even down to her suggestion to wear an apron (cranberries stain and are harder to get out than blood). The end result is a beautifully jellied, bright red cranberry sauce that is slice-able just like the canned stuff, slides right out of your mold, and is probably the best tasting cranberry dish I’ve ever had.
In case you missed the links above, Carrie’s holiday cookbook may be acquired here, and be sure to check out both the Ketovangelist Kitchen website and the Facebook group.