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This is a quick and easy salsa recipe made with fresh cranberries, apples, ginger, scallions, cilantro, and chilies that is especially good with turkey (see our turkey tacos), but can be used with any dish that calls for fresh salsa.
The fresh cranberries are tart, quite tart, so need some sweetness to balance them in this salsa. For that reason we are adding some sugar. The apple too helps bring some sweet balance to the cranberries.
Cranberries are only in season for a short time in the fall. Once they appear in the supermarket, fresh in bags, snatch them up while you can!
They will last frozen for a few months, but even then, after a while they will begin to get a bit iffy, so fall really is the time to enjoy whole cranberries.
Cranberry Salsa Recipe
Most of the ingredients are roughly chopped because they will be going into a food processor. If you don't have a food processor, grate the ginger and finely chop or mince the cranberries, apple, chile, green onions, and cilantro.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups of fresh or frozen cranberries
- 1/2 an apple, peeled, cored, roughly chopped
- 1/2 jalapeño (or serrano) chile, seeds removed, roughly chopped (less or more to taste, depending on how hot the chile is and how hot you would like your salsa to be)
- 2 green onions (scallions), chopped, including light green parts (about 1/4 cup)
- 4 Tbsp sugar
- 2 Tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
- 1 Tbsp peeled chopped ginger
- 1 Tbsp lime or lemon juice
- Dash of salt
Method
1 Place the cranberries, apple, chile, green onions, sugar, cilantro, ginger, lime juice and salt (all of the ingredients) in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse several times until everything is finely chopped and well blended.
2 Let the salsa sit for at least 15 minutes for the sugar in the salsa to soften the chopped cranberries.
Store chilled in an airtight container until ready to serve.
Serve with chips or as a side to pork, chicken, turkey, or steak. You can also place a dollop over a cracker that has been spread with cream cheese for an appetizer.
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Elise Bauer is the founder of Simply Recipes. Elise launched Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to keep track of her family's recipes, and along the way grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. Elise is dedicated to helping home cooks be successful in the kitchen. Elise is a graduate of Stanford University, and lives in Sacramento, California.
Cranberry Salsa
Delicious I added the juice of a whole orange and the whole lemon
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Great taste!
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Wonderful, Lynn, I’m so glad you like it!
I’ve been using this recipe and making this for years now. It’s always a hit, wherever I bring it. It’s delicious on top of cream cheese with crackers, served on it’s own with sweet potato chips or any type of cinnamon cracker/pita chip, or used to top tacos. I buy bags of fresh cranberries and then freeze them so I can make it throughout the holiday season. Thanks for the recipe! It’s become a yearly favorite.
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I’m so glad you like it Elyse! Love the idea of serving over cream cheese.
I am thinking of taking some of this salsa to my sister’s for Thanksgiving. It is a longer trip, so I need to make it in advance. I was wondering how many days will this keep in the fridge once I have made it?
Hi Amanda, it should keep several days in the fridge. You should be fine!
In the introduction it states that Cranberries only last a few months in the freezer. As a 3rd generation cranberry grower, I respectfully disagree. We put several gallon bags of Cranberries in the freezer every year. I used some the other day in a cranberry cake and in our thanksgiving cranberry sauce that were from 2012. They were great, no freezer burn or freezer burn flavor in either item. We use the Ziploc Gallon Freezer bags and double bag them. Cranberries are great ANY time of year and AWESOME in smoothies all year around!
I think it depends on the type of freezer you have. I polled several grocers around here who told me they do not stock frozen cranberries year round because the cranberries don’t last that well in their freezers. I’ve also found mine are fine for several months, but by about March, they’re just not as lovely as they were when I first bought them, like anything in my freezer that gets opened and closed often.
I also have kept cranberries for over a year with no problem. Make sure there are no soft cranberries in the bag, or put them in a ziplock after removing any soft ones. Removing iffy ones is the key. Like freezing anything, you only want firm ones. I’ve also flash frozen them on a cookie sheet before bagging them so that I don’t have to defrost them all if I only want to use a few.