Carbonated Cranberries

When I was nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving din­ner. I went to the library and checked out some books on cook­ing: Escoffier, Julia Child, all of the clas­sics. Some peo­ple ask how my mother could let me do such a thing. Her response is that she couldn’t have stopped me.

It wasn’t the best meal of my life, but it was a start. Since then I’ve made many Thanksgiving din­ners. Perhaps you might even say too many. Everyone loves a tra­di­tional Thanksgiving din­ner but chefs, par­tic­u­larly home chefs, want to use such a meal as a chal­lenge, to both hone and show off their skills. Making the same thing year after year might taste won­der­ful, but it can lose its thrill. The great thing is that you can really mix things up with Thanksgiving while still serv­ing up the basics, like we did in our Thanksgiving Stew recipe. Because every­one knows the tra­di­tional meal you are ref­er­enc­ing, every­one will under­stand the twist you put on a dish.

This is why I love our car­bon­ated cran­berry recipe, which is a riff on our fizzy grapes recipe in Modernist Cuisine. Cranberry sauces come in all sorts of vari­a­tions, from gelled to spicy. That’s why switch­ing up your usual cran­berry dish is a great place to start play­ing around with Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, some peo­ple still want every­thing on their plate to be exactly as they remem­ber Grandma serv­ing. There’s noth­ing wrong with that. But know­ing the sci­ence behind cook­ing can help you bake your bird in an oven with excel­lent results. Your guests don’t even have to know.

–Nathan Myhrvold, author of Modernist Cuisine

We love these car­bon­ated cranberries–a take on our fizzy grapes–for gath­er­ings large and small from now through New Year’s.

Five Tips for a Smooth Thanksgiving Day Feast

  1. Baking a turkey in an oven can be com­pli­cated. For one thing, the light and dark meat can be dif­fi­cult to cook together. We like to cook our turkey piece by piece, sous vide or with a combi oven (in fact, coau­thor Chris Young swears by treat­ing the bird as you would its Asiatic rel­a­tive, the Peking duck).

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  2. If you are going to bake your turkey in the oven, make sure to use a roast­ing rack, which will allow the liq­uid to drain. Food sub­merged beneath the liq­uid won’t brown or crisp. Even though a metal tray or bak­ing sheet will con­duct heat to the sur­face of the food faster than air can, it cap­tures pools of liq­uid that quench the tem­per­a­ture to no higher than the boil­ing point of water. See our inter­ac­tive cut­away photo below for more!

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  3. While your focus might be on get­ting every­thing ready, keep­ing your kitchen from turn­ing into a giant com­post bin, run­ning after lit­tle ones, or top­ping off everyone’s drinks, remem­ber the most impor­tant part of cook­ing: safety. At times like this, it can be easy to for­get the lit­tle things that can be hazardous–especially if you have less-experienced cooks help­ing you. Post a sign to aid you and your helpers that lists safety tips like remem­ber­ing to keep dish tow­els and pres­sur­ized con­tain­ers away from the stove.

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  4. Try incor­po­rat­ing one new or unusual dish each year or serv­ing both the tra­di­tional and Modernist approaches. You could bake your turkey but also cook the wings sous vide. Serve our car­bon­ated cran­ber­ries dur­ing dessert and a more tra­di­tional recipe dur­ing the meal. A few Thanksgivings from now, these dishes will seem like they’ve been on the menu forever.

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  5. Many dishes can be made in advance, espe­cially if you are tak­ing advan­tage of sous vide cook­ing. Give your­self more time to enjoy your friends and fam­ily by doing as much prep work and cook­ing in advance as you can.

Place your cur­sor over the white cir­cles in the photo below to learn more inter­est­ing facts and tips on turkey baking.

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Additional Tips:

  • Because the cran­ber­ries need to be cold before you put them in the siphon, this is a good dish to start ahead of time. Cook them sous vide, and then store them in the refrig­er­a­tor until needed. The juice should be cooled to at least room tem­per­a­ture as well.
  • You can also keep the cran­ber­ries in the siphon after you have car­bon­ated them for 4–12 hours or overnight. Do not keep them in the siphon longer than that. They will actu­ally become too fizzy!
  • After you remove the cran­ber­ries from the siphon, they will retain their fizzi­ness for up to two hours.
  • A soda siphon will not work for this recipe because it has a small mech­a­nism that doesn’t allow for solids. Fortunately, you can just add car­bon diox­ide car­tridges to a whip­ping siphon. We like iSi brand the best.
  • Besides using a car­bon­at­ing siphon, you can also car­bon­ate your cran­ber­ries with dry ice. Layer dry ice in the bot­tom of a con­tainer with a cheese­cloth, paper towel, or tea towel over it. Add your cran­ber­ries, and seal the con­tainer for about 30 minutes.
  • When tra­di­tion­ally mak­ing a cran­berry sauce, you know that you are done cook­ing when the cran­ber­ries “pop” or split. In this case, you want the skin on the cran­ber­ries to remain intact. We have tested sev­eral meth­ods of cook­ing the cran­ber­ries and have dis­cov­ered that sous vide cook­ing is the best bet. In other meth­ods of cook­ing, our cran­ber­ries turned out mushy.
  • Cranberries float. This is great for cran­berry har­vesters who flood their fields to skim off the ripe cran­ber­ries, but prob­lem­atic when cook­ing cran­ber­ries sous vide. Weigh down your vacuum-sealed bag of berries with a trivet or tray so that they will cook evenly.
  • This recipe calls for store-bought cran­berry juice, but if you really want to go the extra mile, fol­low our direc­tions for Cranberry Consommé in our Thanksgiving Stew recipe to make your own juice!
  • Make sure that the iso­malt and fruc­tose have com­pletely dis­solved before remov­ing the pan from the heat.
  • In our tips for mak­ing Cranberry Consommé in our Thanksgiving Stew recipe, we explained that frozen cran­ber­ries work bet­ter because the frozen crys­tals break down cel­lu­lar walls and thus yield more juice. In this case, since you are leav­ing the berries whole, there is no advan­tage to using fresh or frozen cran­ber­ries. They work equally well.
  • You can sub­sti­tute reg­u­lar sugar for the fruc­tose, but not the iso­malt. Isomalt func­tions like sugar, but is not as sweet, which is good to keep the tart­ness of the cranberries.
  • While we love to serve these before din­ner or with dessert, car­bon­a­tion and meat don’t pair well, so we stick to a more tra­di­tional cran­berry sauce dur­ing meals.

We like to serve these on hors d’oeuvre spoons as an amuse-bouche.

Make sure the iso­malt and fruc­tose com­pletely dis­solve in the cran­berry juice.

Because you do not want your cran­ber­ries to burst like they do when mak­ing a tra­di­tional sauce, the gen­tle­ness of sous vide cook­ing is ideal.

Soda siphons will not work in this recipe because they have a mech­a­nism that does not allow for solids. You can, how­ever, use a whip­ping siphon with car­bon diox­ide cartridges.

Have some big Thanksgiving Day plans? Tell us about them in our Cooks Forum!