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I recently tried to make a simple homemade Cumberland sauce. This recipe, from online, included redcurrant jelly (for lack of fresh redcurrant berries where I am), a ruby port, a stick of cinnamon, blanched orange shavings, and some orange and lemon zest.

While the sauce had a good, "covers-the-back-of-the-spoon" consistency in the saucepan and while still warm, it quickly congealed into a thick jelly with the consistency of capital-J Jello as it cooled down to room temperature, after straining it. I suspect this is at least in part because I went for a redcurrant jelly rather than fresh berries; the jelly in question uses pectin as a thickener. I did avoid reducing the sauce as much as I could because of concerns about the redcurrant jelly.

The flavour's there, but even putting it on hot meat, it refuses to liquefy and it's difficult to spread. It doesn't really blend with the meat, so much as sitting on top of it, which is awkward to eat.

I'm not very used to making sauces with a fruit or berry base and I've never worked with pectin before as far as I know; what can I use to water this sauce down in future attempts? Would using fresh berries (once they're in season and available where I am) be the only option?

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It’s pretty standard to use redcurrant jam instead of fresh currants. Just stirring the sauce will thin it out a bit, since colloidal suspensions like this tend to be thixotropic. Diluting with a small amount of water will also work fine. Heating slightly in a microwave will also work. You really don’t need much heat.. a few seconds and then stir.

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    That's good reading material; I'm playing catchup on the chemistry side of cooking, so any ledes like this one are very valuable to me. I'll try bob1's approach of denaturing the pectin over heat during the cook first, but as an after-the-fact fix, this looks like it could work well too! Commented 2 days ago
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Heating is a pretty standard way to inactivate pectin - it is a protein, so denaturation under heat is a normal thing and will degrade function over time. You'll need to test how long for your particular sauce, but 10 minutes might well do it.

You should be able to re-liquify it by heating, though it is traditionally served cold. You might be able to serve it warm (i.e. approximately body-heat) before it gels.

Proper scientific sources (see section 7.2), also here (section 3) tell me that pectin gels best under acidic conditions between pH 2 and pH 6, so you could add some basic compounds such as bicarbonate to neutralize acid, but this would change the flavour of the sauce, and would remove the sharpness.

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  • Thanks! I'll try to denature it by keeping it at a low boil for longer next time I do a batch, likely this coming weekend (and accept an answer at that point). Commented 2 days ago
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    Pectin is not a protein - it's a polysaccharide (complex carbohydrate). Commented yesterday
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Port, orange juice or lemon juice would all be reasonable dilutants from your ingredient list. Or currant juice, if available (juice seems to be more commonly available as blackcurrant than redcurrant, though. At least in my market.)

Or, of course, just water, to thin it out without altering the present balance of flavor.

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