About All Those Cherries

Cherries are the pits.  And the stems.   And the skins.   And , oh yeah, the fruit in between.

Just before pulling in the first pound of cherries, I happened to be talking to my neighbor who mentioned that she had been blessed with some of those cherries a year or so ago, and that it took her three hours to pit enough cherries to make a cobbler in an 8x8 pan.  Wow.  That’s intimidating.

A quick Internet search revealed that there is a product out there that will pit multiple cherries at once, for a fairly small investment.  Great, another kitchen gadget.  On reading down through some of the comments on one of those Internet search results, several other methods were mentioned.  I quickly landed on what is my personal preference for removing pits from cherries.

I have this utensil in my kitchen known in some culinary circles as a “chopstick”.  Using this exotic tool, I can pit a pound of cherries in fifteen minutes. Holding a cherry with the stem already removed (which generally happens during the harvest anyway), I locate the dot on the opposite side of the cherry where the bloom had been.  Positioning the chopstick over this dot, I push the chopstick into the cherry until I locate the pit. 

I then push the pit out the hole left by the removal of the stem.   Soon I have a bowl of pitted cherries, a bowl of pits, and a bowl of subpar cherries reserved for the chickens.

A note about skins:  while making cherry jam, Andy noted that he was expecting “cherry preserves” and that I had “skimmed off all the good stuff”.  Being the ornery Web Mistress that I am, I obligingly canned a jar of nothing but cherry skins for him from the bowl of stuff I had skimmed off the jam.  Be careful what you ask for.  Especially when I am handling scalding hot jam!

Web Mistress