What to Do with Sour Cherries

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Earlier this week we spent a fantastic morning with friends picking sour cherries at Battleview Orchards in Freehold, NJ. Their sour cherry trees are lovely, petite little creatures just perfect for kids to…get all up in. While I was picking in a leisurely fashion, chatting with my friend Rachel, the girls collected 13 pounds of fruit in under 45 minutes. As all fans of pick your own will know, the limiting factor in these expeditions is not the picking itself but the processing at home afterwards, which can be time consuming and, in the case of cherries, a little messy. I’m lucky to have a small, cute team of eager (and these days very capable) cooks and bakers on hand to help. Still, 13 pounds. Blogger that I am, before we’d even left the farm my brain was forming a question that doubles as a post title: What to Do with Sour Cherries (?!?!).

What to do with sour cherries, like, right now

Now that you’re inside my blogger brain, I’ll mention too that this post is jumping the queue because if you need sour cherry recipes, I’m thinking you need them NOW. All right, carry on.

Sour cherries work in pie, corn muffins, Shirley Temples and more

Sour cherries are seriously tart, but the littlest picker and I both really love eating them out of hand. So some small percentage of our haul went straight to our bellies. After that, pie. Obviously. Then some more creative endeavors: sour cherry corn muffins and, in a moment of necessity, sour cherry syrup to be subbed for grenadine in special-occasion Shirley Temples. The good news is that pitted sour cherries freeze beautifully. So not only is there no need for panic, but we’ll get to continue playing with these fleeting beauties in the weeks and months to come. 

Some of our favorite recipes using sour cherries

Here are some of our favorite ways to use sour cherries:

• Domenica Marchetti’s recipe for sour cherry pie (via NPR)
• Sour cherry corn muffins
• Sour cherry Shirley Temples
• Sour cherry frozen yogurt
• Sour cherry French 75 cocktail