Brandied Cherries Offer Sweet Way to Toast NW's Bumper Crop
At the recent Tom Douglas Culinary Camp, I went home with a very cool prize: a jar of brandied cherries. Those boozy treats were put up by Jackie Cross, Tom's wife, who's also quite the accomplished cook. It's been a great year for cherries in the Pacific Northwest, with some stone fruit on sale for as little as 99 cents a pound.
I brought the jar of cherries to a meeting last week to talk about a grassroots effort to breathe new life into the old-fashioned practice of canning and preserving the flavors of summer. This "Canvolution" was born after a passionate discourse on Twitter, the charge being led by veteran food writer Kim O'Donnel, former Washington Post-er whose work can now be found on TrueSlant.com. The "Canning Across America" is a work-in-progress involved in setting up canning demos and classes and encouraging food communities across the country to do the same on the weekend of Aug. 29-30.
The cherries ellicited the expected noises food lovers make when they're chewing something special. Mostly, a chorus of mmmm's all around. These spiked cherries were a world away from the simple Bings my grandmother preserved after picking them off a tree in her backyard. Nana was a canning genius, capturing everything from homegrown raspberries for jam to pears, pickles and, my favorite, peaches.
This "Canning Across America" event reminded me of a story I had written 10 years ago, when the specter of Y-2K prompted a run on canning supplies. The whole Y-2K meltdown never happened and canning moved to the back burner again. But the current economic downturn has reawakened interest among those on belt-tightening family budgets. At the same time, there has been a welcome movement toward more sophisticated recipes such as chutneys and, well, pickled cherries. And by pickled, I mean soused.
Hope you jump on board this summer's canning revolution. Here's a good place to start:
Jackie's Brandied Cherries
Ingredients
4 pounds dark sweet cherries
2 1/4 cups sugar
3/4 cup brandy
Instructions
1. Stem, rinse and pit cherries, saving any juice.
2. Combine cherries, juice, and sugar in a saucepan - heat the mixture gently over medium heat, stirring it occasionally, until sugar has dissolved and cherries are hot. Themixture should not actually boil, though.
3. Divide the brandy among three hot, clean, pint canning jars. Lift the cherries from the syrup using a slotted spoon and distribute them among the jars, leaving ½ inch of headspace.
4. Reheat the syrup until boiling and fill the jars with it, leaving ½ inch of headspace.
5. Remove any bubbles and add more syrup, if necessary.
6. Process the jars in a water bath for 15 minutes to seal.
-- Leslie Kelly
Kim at Dogwood Ridge on August 08, 2009 at 06:33 AM
I made these last night. I am not sure what part of "pit four pounds of cherries" I thought would not be time consuming.....sigh... anyway, I think there is something wrong with the recipe. Four pounds of cherries is, oh, 16 cups or cherries (one pound of cherries being approx. 4 cups). There is no way 4 pounds of cherries fit into 3 pint jars. Did I do something wrong? Have you made the recipe? It is totally my fault not thinking it through beforehand. Perhaps I thought that the cherries would cook down sort of like spinach does. Anyway, It was not to hard to rectify. I had to clean more jars, put more brandy in the bottom of each jar and I did add more sugar. I am hoping that the proportions given in the recipe are correct- 1/4 cup of brandy in the bottom of each pint jar? I haven't tried them, but I guess you can't go wrong with brandy, cherries and sugar on top of homemade vanilla ice cream, can you? Please comment.
Leslie Kelly on August 10, 2009 at 07:04 AM
Oh no!
I hate to hear that. I have not yet made this recipe and went back to make sure I had not missed something when I copied it.
I've put in a request to the brandied cherry cook and will post an update as soon as I hear something.
signs of heart attack on May 17, 2010 at 01:39 PM
Cherries, besides being a very good fruit for most of the world, possesses remineralizing, detoxifying and anti-inflammatory. It is laxative and diuretic because of its fiber content, water and potassium.
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