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Sunday, January 16, 2011

Bottling/Canning Cherries

It's cherry season and everyone is talking cherries; where from, how much, latest rains...
Craig and I had another adventure on Thursday and went to the Sommercote Cherry Farm near Ross.
We travelled via a very old country road through a district that everyone calls "the Nile".
There are some very old farms there that have been in the same families for generations.

We bought a 5kg box and I have to say the quality is not the same as last year. They are definitely seconds which is very disappointing. When bottling, the fruit must be perfect and free from blemish.
Trawling through washing and grading them ourselves I have bottled about 3kg of the 5kg. The rest will be eaten fresh or I will cook some slice like I did last year (if you click on "cherries" at the right hand side in the categories section you'll find the recipe)
I bottle all my fruit in plain old tap water, there is no need for sugar.
Fresh cherries are great but I do love to be able to have some on my cereal in winter for a little hit of summer memories. The other thing I use them for is deserts or cherry sauce with my Moroccan style meatballs.

The REALLY IMPORTANT thing I wanted to tell you though was about the pitting.


You may already know this, but I didn't....
If you place the cherries in the pitter upside down and push the stone out the stalk end, you have a much higher success rate and less wastage. If you do it the other way you loose a plug of cherry flesh nearly every time but actually getting rid of the pit is more hit and miss.
So in the famous words of Blackboard..."upside down, upside down"

3 comments:

  1. Tanya we had some of their cherries courtesy of my brother last weekend and they were good but not a patch on the sublime ones we bought at Sheffield. Oh my goodness, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. They were perfect and we ate them all!

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  2. Hey Tanya, a summer flavour burst in Winter, they look lovely all bottled and ready to use.
    I love cherries and we were looking forward to the first decent crop from our 3 trees. Unfortunately, during a weekend away either the birds got to them or the storm knocked them off and then the birds got them.
    There wasn't one to be found when we got home and no sign as to how they disappeared.
    Very disappointing but fingers crossed for next year.
    Lovely day here, perfect for cleaning windows......

    ReplyDelete
  3. That tip works for olives as well! I have an identical cherry pitter to your and use it to pit both olives and cherries.

    Your cherries look luscious. Did you enjoy the rejects fresh?

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