If you’re searching for a unique spin on a traditional Thanksgiving recipe, look no further — this simple yet delicious homemade cranberry sauce recipe is the perfect way to elevate your holiday meals, savory side dishes, and “leftovers” sandwiches! Infused with cannabis butter, this condiment brings the zest you crave during a heavy meal with the satisfying benefits of THC. And because it’s a sauce, accurately portioning your desired dosage is easy as pie.

No special tools necessary — all you’ll need is a pot, a spatula, and a blender or food processor. Note that for this sweet cannabis Thanksgiving recipe, you’ll need cannabutter, which you can learn how to make step-by-step in our cannabis decarboxylation blog. Without further ado, let’s get started!

You’ll need the following ingredients:

• 2 cups of fresh or frozen cranberries
• 1 cup of orange juice 
• ½ of a large red apple, cored and roughly chopped
• ¼ cup of sugar 
• 1 tablespoon cannabis-infused butter, or a blend of infused and non-infused butter to achieve your desired strength

Recipe instructions

Place a medium-sized saucepan, preferably with a thick bottom, on your stove and turn to medium heat. Add the cranberries, apple, sugar, and orange juice, and give the mixture a good stir to prevent the sugar from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Once the sugar has dissolved, let your mixture come to a gentle, bubbling simmer.

Allow this mixture to simmer for 20 to 30 minutes while stirring occasionally. If the simmer turns to a boil, reduce the heat to prevent burning. The goal of this simmer is to gradually cook the water content out of the fruit, enabling the apples’ pectin to turn all the remaining juices to jelly. This pectin will give your sauce a fantastic consistency and keep the cannabutter evenly suspended throughout for more accurate dosing.

Your sauce is complete once the excess liquid has cooked away, leaving behind what looks like fruit preserves. Now, add your cooked fruit and cannabutter into your blender or food processor and blend thoroughly, pausing to scrape down the sides with a spatula. Make sure you blend it well enough to ensure even and precise dosing. After it’s blended to a cranberry-sauce consistency, place your Rev’d up cranberry sauce in an airtight container and leave it in the fridge to keep fresh for up to seven days.

And there you have it! The best cranberry sauce recipe for the holiday — with an added twist. As always, be sure to abide by your state’s cannabis laws and accurately dose your sauce for responsible consumption.

Dosing out your sauce

Using the math laid out in our cannabutter and decarbing blog, you can work out how many milligrams are in a tablespoon of your cannabutter. Here’s an example that you can apply to figure out the potential potency of your own fresh cranberry sauce batch.

First, weigh your cranberry sauce with a kitchen scale. Make sure you do this after the sauce has been made, since the water loss from cooking will vary per batch. Measure the total weight of your cranberry sauce in grams — let’s say it’s 250 grams. Now take how many milligrams of THC are in your glorious cannabutter (let’s say 200 milligrams of THC) and simply divide milligrams of THC by grams of cranberry sauce. In this example, that’s 200 ÷ 250 = 0.8, meaning every gram of cranberry sauce contains 0.8 milligrams of THC.

After determining how many milligrams of THC are in a gram of cranberry sauce, you can weigh  the amount you’d like to have as your ideal dose. To simplify serving your sauce, you can also weigh out a rough teaspoon instead. Let’s say your heaping teaspoon of cranberry sauce weighs 6 grams — with our hypothetical equation, you can estimate there are 4.8 milligrams of THC per teaspoon (6 x 0.8) and dose out servings accordingly.

It is critically important to label your homemade edibles clearly and store them far away from the reach of children and minors.

Now you know how to make cranberry sauce — the Rev way. Enjoy this fantastic holiday treat as a delightful Thanksgiving dressing or spread it over your leftovers for a revitalizing tang. Happy cooking, and Happy Holidays from Rev!

This recipe was contributed by Rory Reiss, a chocolatier and kitchen technician here at Rev. When he’s not applying his creativity to our i am edible chocolate products, Rory experiments with a variety of cannabis-infused confections at home. With a background in culinary adventures — including nearly a decade of raw vegan chef work and writing — Rory makes everything from various herbal salves and tinctures to home-brewed fermented goodies. Rory enjoys sharing his creations and recipes via Instagram @rory_reiss, so check out his page for more recipes and inspiration for homemade edibles!