Yes! It's time for another installment of Kristin's Kitchen Tip of the Week! Which is actually more like Tip of the Year, because that appears to be the frequency with which I post a handy tip.
Whatever. Let's pit some cherries.
Now, right off the bat, I need to acknowledge that pitting cherries sucks. It's tedious and time-consuming and annoying. Especially if you happen to be standing at the sink in your 87-degree kitchen while you're pitting, with sweat literally dripping off your face and trickling down your back.
Let's hope that's just me, though.
ANYWAY.
There is no easy way that I know of to pit cherries. Even if you get a little gadget, the cherries still have to all be pitted individually. So you may as well just go to your desk and get a paper clip. Works just as well.
Yeah, that's what I said. A paper clip. Just a regular old paper clip, of the sort used to, uh, clip together paper. What you do is, you unbend it until there's only one hook at one end. And then you use the curved part of the hook to get the pit out. Just jam the curved part in at the stem end and pull out the pit*.
There is, of course, a YouTube video showing this. Though the person demonstrating is much more concerned with the appearance of the cherry, stressing that you should rotate the cherry to loosen the pit so there's only a small hole in one side of the cherry and the other side looks nice.
Right. I was boiling the shit out of my sour cherries (procured for free from a neighbor with too many on his tree) with sugar to make cherry sauce, so I didn't give a damn about holes. I just pulled the pit out without rotating anything, which makes the cherry kind of rip apart, but like I said: didn't give a damn. But if you're into aesthetics, by all means, rotate away.
It took me about half an hour to pit around three pounds of cherries. Which made one and a half pints of sour cherry sauce. Not much return on the time investment, but since the cherries were free and so was my cherry pitter, all it cost me was time.
And sour cherry sauce is delicious with vanilla ice cream. Yum.
* This tip is brought to you by the same brilliant mind that taught me the easiest way to cut corn kernels off the cob. That MiL of mine sure is handy.
7 comments:
Nice and handy tip - not that I have ever pitted a cherry. We just eat the sweet ones and elegantly spit them into a bowl. But, should I ever decide to do something more refined with my fruit, I now know I already own a cherry pitter (and rather a large collection of them).
-moi
Husband has done this trick with cherries from our tree. He still swears that he will never pit cherries again, but it worked the first time. Mary in MN
A bobby pin also works. Well, you actually do all the work along with your tool, the bobby pin.
I use the rounded end stick it in past the seed and pluck it out.
Sour cherries take about 3 times as much sugar as cherries. :)Beth
I don't believe I've ever pitted a cherry, either; I use Poster #1's method of elegantly spitting the pits into a bowl. But my boyfriend just picked about 3 lbs of cherries the other day (same as you, from a friend whose tree had more than the friend needed) so I've sent him a link to this post, in case he hasn't already pitted them using some other method. I suggested pie for his cherries, but sauce for ice cream sounds like a winner, too!
Oh, my god. Now I want sour cherry sauce over vanilla ice cream.
I use a chopstick and jam the pit out the other end - usually firing it into the sink or a giant bowl. Doesn't matter what we all use, the kitchen looks like a Stanley Kubrick movie when we are done.
I don't know if the way I do it is any easier than your genius paper clip but I have a 12x12 board that I hammered a nail through. Ignore that preposition. I just slide the cherry onto the pointed end of the nail, the pit is pushed out and I'm onto the next one.
My own cherry pitting tip: if you're going to cook them up (or down) to a sauce, leave the pits in. Use a food mill to take out the pits later. I have a pitter (isn't that a great word?), but I only use it when I really need to preserve the roundness of the cherry, sort of, kinda.
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