Cherry or cranberry sauce with spices

1. Put 300 grams of cherries in a saucepan. Add 90 grams of sugar.

2. And 30 milliliters of water.

3. Add half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, the tip of a teaspoon of ground coriander, about the same amount of ground cardamom and the same amount of ground nutmeg.

You can and even should play and experiment with spices. You can add cloves, both ground and whole; allspice, ginger, rosemary, you can dream up a lot of other things. The only thing I would leave unchanged is cinnamon.

4. Mix the cherries with sugar and spices.

5. Put the saucepan on medium heat and start heating, stirring occasionally. At first, it will seem to you that there is catastrophically little liquid.

Don't worry, as the cherries heat up, they will give off a lot of juice.

6. Heat and stir the contents of the saucepan until the sugar is completely dissolved in the cherry juice.

7. When the sugar has dissolved in the cherry juice, add one level tablespoon of potato starch to a container. Pour a few tablespoons of hot juice from the saucepan into the same container with the starch. Enough so that the starch can be dissolved in the juice.

8. Mix the starch thoroughly in the juice so that there are no lumps left.

9. Remember that the starch from the suspension immediately settles to the bottom, so without hesitating for a second, as soon as you mix the starch in the juice, immediately pour this mixture back into the saucepan.

10. And quickly mix everything there too.

11. Until you get a delicate, smooth, shiny, thick, jelly-like consistency.

That's it, actually. The gorgeous cherry sauce is ready.

12. I tried to cook cranberry sauce using the same principle and I want to show you it quickly and briefly, because there are some nuances. At first, we do exactly the same: 300 grams of cranberries, 90 grams of sugar, spices.

But I add twice as much water - not 30, but 60 milliliters. I'll explain why later.

13. We also put it on medium heat, we also worry that there is still not enough liquid, we also stir.

14. We also observe that the cranberries have given off a lot of juice, but! The fact is that each cherry berry was "injured" when we took the pits out of it. Therefore, it boils down very organically in the sauce. And our cranberries are whole, untouched, and they continue to insist on their integrity throughout the entire cooking. And this is not the best option for sauce.

15. So we take a potato masher and mash the cranberries in the sauce. It is not necessary to mash them all into a mush, but still, most of the berries need to burst. And when we squeezed the contents out of the cranberries, the resulting juice was very thickened by these very contents. And if we had not added more water, then it would have been necessary to add it now, otherwise it would be difficult to dilute the starch in the thick mush.

16. Well, and then everything is the same as with the cherry sauce. Pour in the starch, dilute it with juice, pour it back into the saucepan, stir and enjoy.

17. Enjoy your meal and don't be afraid to experiment!