Cranberry Relish

I fermented Cranberry Relish! It was a quick ferment that only made one jar and I didn't have time to draw a label for it, which makes it feel incomplete.....so here's a drawing of a turkey on a bowling ball!

He hates those pins!

Cranberry's seem to make an appearance on everybody's Thanksgiving table. In my family its usually just the canned variety, which I'm not sure anybody other than me actually eats, and could stand a little bit of an upgrade.  So when I read about fermented cranberry relish on the internets I figured I'd give it a shot, because I am into fermenting things after all (and you just learned something new about me).

Everything in the food processor 

I settled on a fairly simple recipe, which was:

• 12 oz fresh cranberries (1 bag)
• 1 orange, seeded and chopped
• zest of half an orange
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1/3 cup agave nectar
• 1 tsp chopped ginger

 It actually called 2/3 cup of honey, but I found out while making it I only had about 1/3 of a cup, so I used agave nectar to fill out the remaining 1/3 cup of liquid sugar.  Plus it makes it sound fancier, like something you'd order at a hipster restaurant from a guy in skinny jeans and a fancy mustache (Will this relish pair well with my Pimm's Cup?).

Anyway, I put everything into a food processor and pulsed until it was chunky, like a relish (because that's what we're making after all).

Everything chopped and mixed.

Then I packed all that action into a jar, weighed it down with a crock rock (you could probably skip this part if your following along at home), covered, and let it sit at room temp for a few days to ferment. 

There is a crock rock just under the surface.

The color gets darker and the flavor gets fermentier (I'm just making words up now) the longer you let it sit out, and since I like to live dangerously, I went for a full 3 days.

You can almost taste that fermentier flavor!

Once you're done fermenting you can eat it, cap it and put it in the fridge for later, or show up an hour late to Thanksgiving with it so everybody is done eating when you arrive and the only person that has any is your sister in-law who you guilt into trying it (go Terri!).

So how was it? If you like cranberry's its delicious! It didn't have any flavor you might associate with fermented food, but it didn't taste like raw blended cranberries and oranges either. Honestly if nobody told you it was fermented you probably would just think somebody cooked up some fancy cranberry relish for dinner (is that agave nectar I taste?). And given how easy it was to make, I plan to make it again for next Thanksgiving.  Who knows, maybe I'll even be on time next year.