This week my niece and I met a friend and her son to pick cherries on Green Bluff. We were at High Country, which still has plenty of pie cherries, but no more Bing or Rainiers to pick. Other orchards on the bluff are still advertising cherries, but I would call ahead before picking, just to make sure there are cherries to pick when you get there. (Did you know that some orchards will give you up to a 10% discount if you bring your own buckets or boxes? I just learned this and am very happy about the news).

Angie and I picked one gallon of pie cherries and two gallons of really ripe, dark Bing cherries.

Here’s what we did with them:

With the pie cherries we made one big batch of sour cherry jam, a family favorite we never seem to have enough of in the pantry. Sour cherry jam is great on toast, as filling for pancakes, or with good cheese. It’s really good with anything, to tell the truth. I’ve found the Blue Chair Jam recipe to be my favorite. Saunders cooks some of the cherries down with a little water and sugar, then strains them and adds the remaining syrup to whole cherries with more sugar, lemon juice, and a little kirsch added at the end. It is divine jam and beautiful (see photo above). Adding a few tablespoons of kirsch to your favorite sour cherry jam recipe will transform good jam into amazing jam.

I also made a small batch of this Sour Cherry Lime Rickey jam. I like the combination of sour cherries and lime a whole lot—the addition of the gin is just fun. The alcohol gets cooked out, so it isn’t too boozy, just extra citrusy and punchy.

We had a lot more dark cherries, and actually still haven’t finished eating and processing all of them. The cherries this year are just about the most juicy, tasty cherries I’ve eaten. Needless to say, lots of them have just been eaten plain.

With those we didn’t eat we’ve so far made some boozy cherries, our favorites from our testing last year. The favorite batch was the Brandied Cherries from Imbibe—we doubled the batch this year, and I’m still considering preserving more. I used plumb brandy and they are delicious. I like them right out of the jar and the juice added to club soda.

We’ll also make Put ‘Em Up’s Drunken Cherries again—they are very simple and contain enough bourbon to be shelf stable without canning. To make them, cut an “x” in the bottom of enough cherries (not pitted, but stems removed) to fill as many jars as you want (a pound of cherries makes about a quart), make a quick brown sugar simple syrup, using a 1 to 1 ratio of sugar and water. Divide the syrup among your jars, adding about ½” of syrup to each, then fill the jars with bourbon. Easy and no pitting is involved.

The Sour Cherry recipe from Hounds in the Kitchen is also good, but we didn’t love the maraschino cherries—we in fact gave all of them to friends who did like them upon tasting. We stuck to the others.

I also make Black Forest Preserves from the Ball preserving book. They are wonderful; we’re thinking of using the preserves between the layers of chocolate cake. They are also quite good with a spoon. The only adjustment I made to the recipe was a slight increase in the amount of cocoa powder; I used ½ a cup because I was at the end of the container. Add a bit more cocoa powder will not affect the stability of the canned preserves.

Cherries in wine from Eugenia Bone’s Well-Preserved are also cooling on the counter. If you have Bone’s book, you already know how good it is. I love that she gives you a preserve recipe, then 3 to 4 recipes for using it in preparing other dishes. If you don’t own it, you should. Every recipe I’ve tried has been wonderful. I would recommend cutting the liquids down in the cherries in wine recipe. I had too much extra syrup and ended up canning it separately.

I’m sure there are some cherry preserves I’m missing. What are you making this year?

 

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