Transform Leftover Canned Cranberry Sauce Into Delicious Fruit Leather

Once the annual Thanksgiving feast comes to an end, it's almost inevitable to find yourself surrounded by a mountain of leftovers. While the main dish can quickly be adapted into creative leftover turkey sandwiches (or even turkey tamales), any remaining canned cranberry sauce often gets left behind, collecting dust in the fridge. Sure, you can opt for a boozy treat by making a cosmopolitan cocktail using leftover cranberry sauce, but for an irresistible and easy-to-make snack, try turning your leftover cranberry sauce into homemade fruit leather.

The process for making homemade fruit leather couldn't be any simpler. To begin, puree your canned cranberry sauce using a food processor, blender, or immersion blender until smooth. This is especially important if your cranberry sauce has large chunks of cranberry mixed in, as you'll want your fruit leather to be as smooth as possible. Once pureed, pour the cranberry mixture onto a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. From there, place the prepared baking sheet into a dehydrator or an oven set as low as possible (anywhere from 140 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on your oven) for a few hours until the fruit leather is dry to the touch and no longer sticky. Once thoroughly dried, roll the fruit leather with the parchment paper to create a tight spiral. Using food-grade scissors or a knife, cut the large spirals into small, cross-wise pieces, about an inch in diameter.

When it comes to customizing your homemade cranberry fruit leather, the only limit is your imagination. Since cranberry has such a tart flavor, it tends to pair best with sweet fruits, such as apple, pear, mango, or pineapple. To incorporate these types of flavors into your snack, simply add as much fresh fruit into the cranberry puree as your heart desires and bake/dry as usual. For the best flavor, overripe fruits tend to work best since they have the most sweetness. If you're looking for inspiration, our two-ingredient fruit roll-ups offer several flavor-filled fruity suggestions.

While you might think that adding fruit juice to the mixture will help incorporate some extra fruity flavors to your fruit leather, you'll need to balance the juice with enough fruit pulp to hold its form after its dried out. For example, you can add pomegranate juice alongside applesauce, which provides substance from its fruit pulp with a neutral flavor that won't overpower the juice. If you want to enhance the natural flavors found in the cranberry sauce, you can add some warm spices to your puree, such as cinnamon, allspice, or cloves. This will create a fuller depth of flavor to your fruit leather, balancing the more bitter notes from the cranberry. If you want your fruit leather to pack a spicy punch, you can add some fresh or candied ginger into the cranberry mixture.