Juicy fruits: 17 ways to cook with cherries – from sorbet to vodka to black forest gateau
As cherry season gets into full swing, allow me to recommend a small, but judicious, purchase – buy yourself a cherry stoner.
You may already have one in a drawer somewhere – a tool you’ve inherited without ever knowing what it is: little sprung jaws featuring a spoon with a hole in it on one side and a corresponding protrusion on the other. You can pick one up for as little as three quid, and it does olives as well.
If you haven’t got one of these and you’re faced with a recipe asking you to stone 500g of cherries, the most sensible course is to sit down, eat all the cherries and spit the stones out the window. This is, of course, the ultimate test of any cherry recipe: does it represent any sort of improvement on just eating cherries? If it’s close, a stoner may tip the balance.
You can buy gadgets that stone six cherries at once, or machines that will stone a whole hopper full but, for a seasonal task like this, a little effort – a little ritual, even – is probably a good thing. It ought to take you a bit of time. There are other satisfactory methods, like this one using a bottle and a chopstick, but you may have to find the right bottleneck for your particular size of cherry. You can also manage the operation – messily – with a paperclip, should you find yourself cooking in an office setting.
Nigel Slater’s recipes for cherry pie and cherry polenta cake are both good places to start – they’re straightforward and don’t ask too much of you.
One of the difficulties of cherry season is that it arrives just at the point when the weather makes baking seem like a terrible idea. Chill your pastry dough that little bit longer, and find some shade to sit in while you wait.
Cherry sorbet sounds an altogether cooler dessert, and Tamal Ray’s recipe requires only about 20 minutes over a hot stove. Better still, it has just three ingredients: cherries, sugar and white wine. Incidentally, if you’re going to end up with a puree, you don’t need to make a fuss about stoning the cherries. Just whack each one with the flat of a knife like you would a clove of garlic; the stone will come away easily. Or, as Ray points out, you can cook the cherries whole and remove the stones once they’re soft.
Clafoutis is a French dessert – whole cherries (stones left in, traditionally) baked in a batter until just set. Felicity Cloake’s perfect version contains almond essence and kirsch – a morello cherry liqueur which she describes as “ridiculously expensive”. Feel free to leave it out, along with the stones.
Alternatively, you could invest in some kirsch for the season, since it is also called for in Liam Charles’s wholly nontraditional cherry bakewell custard tart. There is a lot going on in the name of this dish, but it is not unrelated to the clafoutis: cherries, almond essence and kirsch, baked in custard.
This cherry galette also marries cherries and almonds – in this case via frangipane, the almond, flour, butter, sugar and egg paste that occupies a mysterious border realm somewhere between crust and filling. “Galette”, roughly translated, means “don’t worry – it’s supposed to look like that.” White spelt flour is recommended for the pastry, but it’s not a dealbreaker.
Rachel Roddy’s cherry and ricotta tart has a latticed crust top with ricotta puffing out from underneath and a cherry filling below that. In Italy the cherries would be sour, but you can make this work with whatever sort you’ve got. The trick is to avoid overcooking the cherries – remove them with a slotted spoon before they turn mushy, reduce the remaining liquid to a syrup, and then put the cherries back in.
Cherries and chocolate are another classic combination, most notably in black forest gateau, which is normally made with tinned black cherries, sometimes with the perverse addition of fresh cherries – stalks on – as a decoration. Dan Lepard uses fresh cherries to make the filling first. Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall preserves the basic pairing in his cherry chocolate tart, which calls for yet more kirsch. It also requires you to be forward thinking enough to leave the cherries to infuse overnight.
For sheer laid-back ease, I love the idea of a “broken cake”: basically any stale cake ripped up and tossed with cherry syrup, fresh fruit, cream or ricotta and other things. It’s hardly even a recipe, and it makes Eton mess look positively ordered.
Fresh cherries may just be for summer, but they’re not just for pudding. They can make an appearance in salads, alongside rocket or goat’s cheese or both, with cucumber, basil and quinoa, or roasted, with buttermilk dressing and lettuce.
This pickled-cherries recipe (Nigel Slater again – going through his back catalogue, you get the impression he really likes cherries) can be served over mackerel or gammon. And duck with cherry sauce is most definitely a thing.
A seasonal glut and a greedy nature will invariably leave you with some less than perfect, slightly post-ripe fruit and the distinct feeling that you never want to look at another cherry again. This will not last, but in the meantime you can make enough jam to see you through the dark, cheerless, cherryless months. This is an easy method, but the jam sugar is not optional: cherries are low in pectin, so they won’t set by themselves. In contrast, this cherry and chia seed jam, from reader Rheanna Lucy Akua Griffin, has no sugar in it: just a little agave nectar or honey.
Finally, when you have exhausted all other avenues, make this cherry vodka – absolutely no stoning required. Slit 400g of cherries, heat them with water and sugar until dissolved, cool, add a bottle of vodka, seal the mixture up and leave it for at least four weeks. It’s the poor man’s kirsch.