A few photos from an all-day preservation binge earlier this summer on a large quantity of Bing, Brooks, Rainier, and Tulare cherries:
I’m deeply skeptical of all single-purpose kitchen utensils, but I will say the 6-cherry pitter was effective:
Macerating some of them in sugar in preparation for shrubs.
A few weeks later, the final bottled and labeled shrubs:
- Rainier cherries with fennel
- 5 cups pitted and chopped cherries macerated in 2 cups sugar with half a bulb of fennel for 24 hours, which drew juice out of the cherries, producing about 2 1/3 cups of juice, then strained and rinsed with 1 1/2 cups of champagne vinegar and 1/2 cup of cider vinegar and bottled (a roughly 2:1:1 chopped fruit to sugar to vinegar ratio)
- A mix of Tulare (less flavorful) and Bing (delicious!) cherries, macerated on sugar and rinsed and bottled with cider vinegar, in three different batches:
- Cherries with bay leaf and peppercorn (very subtle bay leaf, just tasted like cherries)
- Cherries with vanilla beans and pink peppercorns
- Cherries with fresh ginger
Leftover sugared fruit from shrubs (with some juice extracted) still makes good cherry jam:
Other cherry preservation we performed that day: cocktail cherries (both salt brined and unbrined, I don’t have the recipe handy), cherry mostarda, cherry-infused bourbon (bulleit 95 rye poured over a 1qt jar of bing cherries for about a month, then strained)…