OT: cherries - ideas please

I was curious, Janner, so I went to Joy of Cooking just to see what they had to say about sour cherries. Here you go: Cooking and sugar mellow them wonderfully. The only thing I've ever canned was a jar of fireflies. ( with a vented lid, of course) Polly

"Janner" <

Small tart cherries are what my family always called "pie cherries", we make pies out of them. They are very sour! My Uncle and the man next door made wine out of them, they actually made wine out of everything! There was wine in every type of fruit, they liked wine!

I bet that was yummy wine, Bonnie. Up here we call them 'culls'. LOL This is cherry country and when the cherries hit it's big. Every unemployed body and soul can find a job for at least 6 weeks at the cherry sheds and the money is pretty good, if your back can handle it.

Anyway, I'd cook them with plenty of sugar and then mash them through a strainer (to get the pits out -- I would never try to pit a tiny cherry) and then cook that goo some more with pectin and sugar and make jam. Jam is my fruit fall-back. Leave the fruit on the counter too long? Jam. Did it get frozen and forgotten? Jam. Nobody like this type of peaches? Jam. I like jam. On biscuits.

Sunny I'm going to make biscuits

They're not, they're a distinct cultivated variety - "morello" cherries, "kizilcik" in Turkish. They're used for juicing in Turkey and some other countries in Eastern Europe, usually with water and sugar added. The resulting drink is called "visne" (pronounced "vish-nay") in Turkish and by somewhat similar words in most of Europe east of Prague.

They do work for jam as well.

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I always thought morello cherries were large, dark-ish & sour, not small and sour. We had a morello cherry tree when I was growing up, it used to produce 150 - 200lbs each summer. We had to net it to get to keep some for us. We also had a Napoleon sweet cherry & one called Early rivers IIRC. We ate a lot of cherries in the early summer.

Lizzy

I'm going over to Sunny's for biscuits and cherry jam....mmmmmm. ( i make a lot of jam too)

amy in CNY

Having grown up in the "Cherry Capital of the World", in Traverse City, Mi which has hosted a National Cherry Festival for a week every July for more than 50 years, I'm about cherried out, but I still do love them.

We've always used the tart cherries for jams, jellies and pies, tarts, crisps and the like. The sugar added softened the tartness but made lovely edibles. The sweets were always used for just eating, although there are some people that use certain varieties for pies. Waaaaaaaayyyyyy to sweet for me when that is done.

I'm the odd one out and have always loved just eating the sours like most people eats sweets. I think your sours would do just fine for pies and jam. If they are really small though and hard to pit from being too small, I think that crushing them for the juice might work better to make jelly instead. Just an idea.

Steven Alaska

They make wonderful jam and cherry syrup. I have been known to use the syrup in place of kirschwasser for Black Forest torte.

Kay

Amazing. I had no idea there was a substitute for kirschwasser. Polly

"Kay Lancaster"

I make a fabulous icecream using very sour tiny plums.

Sally at the Seaside ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~uk

Kay Lancaster wrote:

On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 06:55:12 -0500, Janner wrote (in article ):

Sour cherries make a nice pie. 'course you will need to add sugar.

Maureen

On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 11:51:45 -0500, Sunny wrote (in article ):

What time should I be there Sunny?

Maureen

Thanks for all the ideas, it would be a shame to waste them. Jelly sounds good, so does pie.

Janner France