Fermenting Cranberries in Honey and Cranberry Facts

We fermented cranberries in honey for our Thanksgiving dinner. Here is a link if you'd like to start one for Christmas dinner.

Cranberries in Raw Honey Ferment
This recipe is much like the Garlic and Raw Honey…the big difference is of course, the use of fresh cranberries in place of the garlic. Cranberries in Raw Honey will not have the exact health benefits of the garlic mixture. There are still culinary and health benefits. Can’t wait to use these fermented cranberries in some relish, chutney, and sauces.
Ingredients:
Fresh Cranberries, well sorted, washed and dried
Raw Honey
fresh ginger slices/chunks
cinnamon stick
Directions:
Place some of the clean freshly cleaned cranberries in a Fido jar (a jar with a rubber gasket and snap down lid – or a ball canning jar).
Add some of the raw honey, ginger and the cinnamon stick. Continue adding the honey until you are about 2 inches from the top. Snap or turn the lid.
Place the cranberry and honey filled jar on a plate or pan to catch any potential bubbling. Turn the jar daily for about two weeks.
Let it ferment for a month or two or up to a year.
Store in a cool area

Cranberry Facts

• The cranberry is one of only three native fruits cultivated in North America. Others include the blueberry and Concord grape.
• A barrel of cranberries weighs 100 pounds. Give or take a few, there are about 450 cranberries in a pound and 4,400 cranberries in one gallon of juice.
• Cranberries are primarily grown in five U.S. states - Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington - as well as British Columbia and Quebec, Canada.
• Contrary to popular belief, cranberries do not grow in water. A perennial plant, cranberries grow on low-running vines in sandy bogs and marshes. Because cranberries float, some bogs are flooded with water when the fruit is ready for harvest. Others are harvested using machines that resemble lawnmowers that “comb” fresh cranberries off the vines.
• Cranberries bounce! Small pockets of air inside the fruit enable fresh fruit to bounce. It is also what makes berries float in water, which is how many cranberries are harvested.
• If all the cranberry bogs in North America were put together, they would comprise an area equal in size to the tiny island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts, which is approximately 47 square miles.
• If you strung all the cranberries produced in North America last year, they would stretch from Boston to Los Angeles more than 565 times.

• Native Americans used cranberries, fat and ground venison to make a survival cake known as pemmican. They also used the fruit in poultices and fabric dyes.
• Legend has it that Pilgrims served cranberries, along with wild turkey and succotash, at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
• Documentation suggests that the first commercial cranberry harvest took place in Dennis, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod) in 1816.
• In the 1880s, a New Jersey grower named John “Peg Leg” Webb discovered that cranberries bounce. Instead of carrying his crop down from the storage loft of his barn, Webb poured them down the steps. He noticed that only the freshest, firmest fruit reached the bottom; rotten or bruised berries didn't bounce and remained on the steps. This discovery led to the invention of "bounceboards", tools used to separate rotten berries from fresh ones.
• During World War II, American troops required about one million pounds of dehydrated cranberries a year.
• Today, Americans consume some 400 million pounds of cranberries each year, 20 percent of that during Thanksgiving week!