Sour cherries

As I said in my previous post, last week we picked about six pounds of sour cherries from decorative trees in our church's parking lot. I don't know what variety they are, but the tree leaves and the fruit are both a dark dark red, almost black.

I divided the cherries up into two batches of three pounds each. I realized I didn't have a cherry pitter, so I googled how to remove the pits without one. There are some interesting ideas out there: some people use a bottle and a chopstick, others use a paperclip, others use a paring knife, and still others just use their fingers. But the one that seemed easiest to me was the suggestion to just remove the stems by hand, then cook the cherries with about 1/4 cup of water, then use a potato masher to smoosh it all up, then a food mill (or chinois/China cap) to separate the pulp from the pits.

So I did all that and then dumped the mush into my food mill (I have a bog-standard Foley food mill with three interchangeable strainer thingies, each with different size holes). OMG I worked up a sweat with that thing! It certainly didn't seem this hard to use the last time I used it (on prickly pear fruit), but I soldiered on and eventually had a bowl of fruit pulp and a pile of pits. *whew*

I dug out my Ball Blue Book and followed the recipe for making and canning Sour Cherry Preserves. 

I don't know what happened, but it did NOT set up, not even the jar I put in the fridge overnight! Mutter.

So the next day, I opened all the jars and re-cooked the jam. I added a bit more pectin and a bit more sugar and let it boil hard for two minutes then poured it into hot jars and processed it.

No joy. The next morning, it was still not set. Sigh. "OK," I thought, "it's not jam; it's syrup! Still yummy. Still usable. No big deal." A couple of days later I noticed that, not only was it NOT set, but the pulp had separated from the juice, creating two distinct layers in each of the jars. Double sigh. So I opened all the jars yet again (such a waste of the lids -- they can't be re-used once they've been sealed onto a jar. At least they can be recycled as scrap metal. Sigh.). 

This time, I strained the juice & pulp through a couple of muslin jelly bags. I was initially planning to discard the pulp, but Bri tasted it and said it'd be a good sandwich spread once it was gelled, so I cooked the juice separately from the pulp and added even more pectin to each batch. I poured them into hot jars & processed them. Those jars are sitting in my pantry now. They're STILL not set, though the pulp is much thicker than the syrup, as one would expect, LOL. 

Meanwhile, I still had three more pounds of cherries to deal with, so I decided to spend the $5.00 and bought a cherry pitter from Amazon. It arrived yesterday and I used it last night and this morning to pit the remaining cherries. Initially I was concerned with how much cherry flesh was expelled with the pits -- I don't want any of that yummy fruity goodness to go to waste! But I learned from my previous experience and had a plan. :-) 

Here's a pic of the pitted cherries:

And here are the pits with some cherry flesh still attached:

I put the pitted cherries into a pan, added a few cups of sugar as well as the last bit of some Honey Mead I had on hand, and started heating them on low heat.

Meanwhile, I put the pits (along with the flesh clinging to them) in another pan and added just enough water to cover. Once they were boiling, I used the potato masher to mush it all up -- it really does work well to separate the pits from the flesh -- then put the resulting slurry through my big mesh sieve, pushing it through with the back of the ladle. (This was MUCH easier than using the food mill!) I put the strained pulp in the pot with the pitted cherries. Then I put the pits into a small bowl and covered them with water, then swished them around to make sure I got all the yummy fruity goodness off of them, then put that water into the pot with the pitted cherries.

I used my immersion blender to blend the cherries all up into a pulp. Initially, I was planning to just make jam, but I decided that I liked the idea of a batch of jelly and a batch of cherry spread. I googled to see if there was such a thing as "cherry butter" and lo, and behold, there is! I found this easy-peasy recipe and decided to modify it a bit for my own situation, so I could make cherry jelly as well as cherry butter.

First, I poured the blended cherry pulp through the big mesh sieve (pictured above). I put all the pulp that ended up in the sieve into the 1.5L slow cooker I got from my mom's estate. Then I lined the sieve with several layers of cheesecloth and passed the strained liquid through them. Again I put the pulp that ended up in the cheesecloth into the slow cooker crock. Then I took that strained liquid and passed it through one of my muslin jelly bags, again putting the pulp into the slow cooker crock. Finally, I passed the liquid through another muslin jelly bag. There wasn't much pulp left in that bag!

I ended up with almost 3L of juice:

and a slow cooker full of pulp:

I used the immersion blender on the pulp again to make it nice and smooth, then cooked the pulp on high for a few hours, with the lid propped up with bamboo skewers -- because I want the crock covered, but need to let the liquid evaporate:

I'll leave it to cook on low overnight and hopefully tomorrow it'll be full of yummy cherry butter goodness!

Meanwhile, I poured the cherry juice into a big shallow pan and added a bit more sugar, as well as some pectin. While adding the pectin, I emptied the jar I had, so I opened up the new one I bought yesterday. I noticed that the new pectin was almost white, while the old pectin was more off-white. 

Hmm, could the reason the first batch didn't set be because the pectin was old??!!

I cooked the juice on low for a while. While it was heating up, I put some clean jars into the canner and let it heat up, too, so they'd be ready when I needed them.

Once the juice started steaming and bubbling, I put a bit of the juice onto a chilled glass plate (I put the bare plate into the freezer when I started cooking the juice) and then put it back into the freezer for two minutes. When the timer went off, I found the juice on the plate had gelled nicely. Yay! I turned the burner to high and brought the juice to a hard rolling boil that wouldn't stir down (it took a few minutes to get to that point). I set the timer for one minute and kept stirring. 

When the timer went off, I turned off the heat and ladled the hot juice into the hot jars, sealed them, turned the heat back up and waited for the canner to come back up to temperature. I processed them for 10 minutes. The jars are now cooling on my pantry shelf. 

Hopefully, they'll gel overnight and I'll have some beautiful jelly tomorrow!

Meanwhile, I have to decide what to do with the not-set batch of jelly and spread from the other day. I might leave the not-set jelly alone -- it's just cherry syrup now, which is useful for many things (not the least of which is as a topping for ice cream or pancakes!) -- but I might make another batch of crock pot cherry butter from the not-set pulp spread. 

We'll see!