Easy Homemade Huckleberry Sauce

Homemade huckleberry sauce is a great way to use your harvest of mountain huckleberries, and our recipe is perfectly sweet and tart. It’s great for topping ice cream, pancakes, cheesecake, and more.

We’re back with another huckleberry recipe, and this time it’s a versatile and super-easy recipe for homemade huckleberry sauce.

If you’re looking for an easy recipe to make with fresh (or fresh to frozen) huckleberries that can be used for a lot of different things, you’ve come to the right post!

Our recipe doesn’t use pectin or cornstarch, just huckleberries, sugar, water, and lemon juice (optional if your berries are on the tart side).

We included a little background info on mountain/western huckleberries in our huckleberry ice cream recipe, so we won’t include that here. Head over to the ice cream post if you want to read about the difference between eastern huckleberries and mountain huckleberries, what the plant looks like, etc.

If you want to try this recipe but don’t have fresh or frozen huckleberries, you can use wild blueberries since they are related to huckleberries. The taste and color won’t be exactly the same of course, but wild blueberries will cook up very similar to mountain huckleberries.

Why we love this recipe

This huckleberry sauce recipe is easy to make with simple ingredients, and it’s delicious served on pancakes, ice cream, short cakes, and more. We also use this sauce in our dairy free huckleberry milkshake recipe!

This sauce also makes great gifts for friends and family as well. You can either can the sauce in jars or add it to jars to be refrigerated if you know you’ll be using them up within a couple of weeks.

How to make simple huckleberry sauce

Here are the steps to make our simple huckleberry sauce. This is just an overview of the steps, the full recipe is at the end of the post.

• Pick through your fresh huckleberries, removing wrinkled or bad berries, stems, and leaves, then rinse your berries.
• Add 2 cups of the huckleberries to a 2-quart saucepan and add the sugar, water, and lemon juice.
• If your huckleberries are more tart or are slightly underripe, you can reduce or skip the lemon juice.

• Stir and heat over medium heat until the liquid begins to bubble, then reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 12-15 minutes, stirring regularly. The berries will soften and the juices will thicken as they cook down.
• Remove from the heat and allow to cool. It may seem too runny at first, but it will thicken as it cools. The sauce will reach its full thickness once it has completely chilled in the fridge for 1-2 hours.

• If you want an even thicker sauce, you can cook this for 15-20 minutes until the berries get softer and a bit mushy. Cooking longer will result in a pretty thick sauce similar to homemade cranberry sauce.

Check out our chokecherry syrup and chokecherry lemonade recipes!

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