Recipe help: Ingredient no longer available in form called for

Cafe Society
1

Background: My wife is Danish, and each holiday season she makes a traditional dish we know simply as Red Cabbage.

The recipe calls for (2) 12oz cans of frozen cranberry-raspberry concentrate, which a brief search of the internet would indicate is no longer available. The recipe does not call for making the juice according to the package directions, and my wife has never added any water to the recipe, just opens the cans and dumps the concentrate in. We think that she can somehow substitute regular cranberry-raspberry juice, but it seems to us that the juice in the jugs at the store would be significantly watered down compared to the frozen concentrate. and we don’t have a clue how to convert the measurement.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Lucy

2

I think frozen cranberry juice concentrate is still available so if you can find frozen raspberry juice concentrate, just get one of each? And if the raspberry juice concentrate isn’t available, any sort of berry juice concentrate might be close enough?

3

Or get some Cran-Raspberry juice (“How is this still a thing?”) and reduce it down in a saucepan?

Stranger

4

You may have to order online, but frozen cranberry juice concentrate is fairly generally available, and I was able to find a non-frozen raspberry juice concentrate on Amazon. It may not be as concentrated as the frozen one, it’s hard to tell if you don’t have any packaging of the old one left.

Also, you can always cook down a juice in order to make it more concentrated. All you are doing is driving out the water and leaving the essence.

Finally, I wonder if you could substitute a different tart fruit juice for the raspberry, say tart cherry for example. Walmart has that, and maybe other places.

eta: basically ninja’d. Posting anyway.

5

I’ve never seen it.

6

The frozen concentrate is typically (but not always) 1 can concentrate to 3 cans water. So you’d want to reduce your juice to 1/4.

Can you find a can of concentrate online and check the dilution instructions?

7

Safeway, for one, has “berry berry” concentrate. Looks like it’s mostly apple juice but there’s a bit of raspberry juice in there somewhere. (Plus I suspect the difference wouldn’t be noticeable.)

8

I suspect there’d be a big difference.

9

Maybe. A company called “Old Orchard” sells or used to sell cranberry-raspberry juice concentrate. The website still lists it, including an ingredients list.

Apple juice concentrate, filtered water, pear juice concentrate, grape juice concentrate, natural flavors, citric acid, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), fumaric acid, cranberry juice concentrate, raspberry juice concentrate.

Meanwhile the same company’s apple raspberry juice concentrate has these ingredients

Apple juice concentrate, filtered water, pear juice concentrate, grape juice concentrate, citric acid, natural flavors, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), raspberry juice concentrate.

This ingredient is already mostly other stuff.

10

We’ve been looking for a couple of hours now but every time I find the frozen concentrate and try to buy it they tell me it’s no longer available. Wife told me that she used just straight cranberry juice concentrate the last time around and it worked out okay, but none of our local stores carry it any more and, like I said, whenever I find it and try to buy it it’s not actually available.

So, we’re thinking we’re going to have to reduce it from the cran-raspberry juice that we can buy in the local store, just not at all certain how to go about reducing it so that the flavor added is approximately the same.

I can find pictures of Welch’s concentrate online, but none of those show the directions or the ratio of water/concentrate. Starting to look like some experimentation is in order.

Lucy

11

I suspect that if you have to boil the cranberry-raspberry juice down, you’re going to affect the flavor.

And Googling for the recipes for Danish red cabbage, I find that they call for current juice, though cranberry juice could substitute. So I doubt the need for cranberry-raspberry juice is very exact.

12

Without knowing more about the recipe, it’s impossible to say. However, if it is, as the name suggests, a cabbage dish, then any tart red liquid might produce fairly similar results.

13

But how much tartness is there if it’s mostly apple juice?

14

What you’re looking for is basically frozen cranberry sauce. You could make a sauce by boiling fresh cranberries in raspberry juice with some added sugar. You can pulverize the sauce in a food processor or blender if you want it to be the texture of the frozen stuff.

15

Are there Swedish recipes online that could provide alternatives? A Swedish cooking Reddit?

16

I looked at many recipes. Currant juice is commonly added.

Some have currant jam.

Some red wine vinegar, sugar and apples.

I bet any red juice or jam will be fine. Maybe even canned cranberry sauce would do.

(Is this Rødkål?)

17

AIUI, apple juice is used as a sweetener not primarily as a flavoring agent.

18

I’m thinking the red juice is helpful with the color of the dish too.

19

If, as in the Old Orchard product for which I provided the ingredients list, there’s less cranberry juice concentrate than there is Vitamin C, how much flavor could it possibly be adding?

20

Look at Pomono brand on Amazon. I didn’t dig far enough, looking for Cran-raspberry, but they do have liquid concentrates.