These 3 Easy Ingredients Make Anthony Bourdain-Style Thanksgiving Cranberry Relish

Anthony Bourdain may not be a name you associate with Thanksgiving, but even the most seasoned professionals and adventurous eaters have to figure out how to put a turkey and stuffing on the table for their family. Bourdain is most associated with the diverse local cuisines and street foods he explored as a TV host and the French cooking he made professionally, but later in his life he was also a family man with a big house to feed, and he translated a lot of his professional chef knowledge to making a classic Thanksgiving dinner as easy and crowd-pleasing as possible. And one of the smallest —but most useful — twists he put on it was avoiding cranberry sauce and opting for a cranberry relish made with just cranberries, orange, and sugar.

Bourdain's cranberry relish has a few big advantages over the sauce. For one, it is a no-cook recipe. Instead the orange and cranberry just go into a food processor and get pulsed until they form a roughly chopped mixture. It can be done in 15 minutes. And second, it can be prepared ahead of time. In fact, Bourdain preferred it that way, saying it only got better the longer it sat in the fridge. It's the kind of prep-and-forget-it holiday side dish recipe that a cook trying to optimize their time will really appreciate.

Despite needing only three ingredients the cranberry relish recipe Bourdain gave Food & Wine does have a "secret" ingredient, which is the sugar. After the oranges and cranberries are pulsed together, using three and a quarter cups of cranberries and one sliced up navel orange, a full cup of sugar is added to the relish. Bourdain admits of the recipe, "It contains a shocking amount of sugar," but adds "which you should not balk at. It's a holiday."

Because fresh cranberries are very tart and astringent, the mixture needs to macerate in the sugar to mellow the fruit. Letting it sit in the fridge will also allow the sugar to draw out more liquid from the fruit, which will help soften the texture a bit. Make sure you don't use frozen whole cranberries either, as they can end up with a mushier texture. You can also add a little extra flavor with spices like cinnamon or ginger, which will add a little more complexity. But don't go heavy on the spice, you want the fresh bite of the cranberries to shine through, which it normally will despite all that sugar. According to Bourdain, it is best on the second day, but it will stay good in the fridge for up to 10 days. It's the easiest swap that will also upgrade your classic Thanksgiving dinner.