Cranberries are a late-season fruit, and they’re only available for a short time in November and December each year.
I absolutely love these tart berries, and I’m always looking for creative cranberry canning recipes.
Though cranberries freeze well, they take up a lot of space if you plan on eating them more than once or twice a year.
Competition for freezer space is fierce around our homestead, since we’re putting up all manner of produce from the garden, plus a side of beef and pork too.
I’m always looking for ways to store our harvest on the pantry shelf, instead of in the freezer. (Especially when power outages are the norm here during our long Vermont winters.)
Beyond the space issue, freezing destroys much of their natural pectin. After about a week in the freezer, cranberries have lost about half of their pectin content, and they’ll no longer make a firm cranberry jelly.
Canning cranberries both preserves them, and turns them into a ready to enjoy treat, no matter how you use them.
Read More: 12+ Cranberry Canning Recipes
If there’s a canning or preserving recipe that you’d like to find, please do let me know in the comments, and I’ll see what I can do to track it down for you.
Happy Canning!
-Ashley at Creative Canning
(Ps. I also run the blog Practical Self Reliance, which has information on all manner of food preservation techniques (cheesemaking, salt curing, fermenting) as well as just about everything else you’d need to learn to be self-reliant in this modern world. It has its own substack as well, and you can subscribe to practical self-reliance separately as well. That newsletter comes out weekly and covers canning, as well as everything else.)