Cherries, cherries, cherries

After last weekend's success with cherries, I said: "Maybe next week we can get another kilo or two and a pitter and try canning some cherries". Yesterday we made maybe a certainty. :-)

After much searching we ended up finding the last cherry pitter in the city of Basel (at least it seemed that way), and that a display model. At the market Andrea must have been quite charming to the farmer (or maybe it's just the end of the season :-), because she asked for 3 kilos and he gave us a flat with 5-6 kilos. We got sour cherries because they were the only thing available, but they are what you are "supposed" to use for preserves anyway... so no problem there.

At home the work started. The pitter actually made things pretty painless.

The pitter design is very simple: the cherries fall one at a time over a hole with a plastic gasket at the bottom. The plunger comes down and pushes the pit through the gasket:when the plunger comes back up, it lifts the pitless cherry over the lip that was holding it over the hole, and the cherry falls into your collecting bowl. Super simple, very effective, and you can do a lot of cherries pretty quickly:
After pitting the cherries, I mixed them with a kilo of gelierzucker (sugar + pectin) and slowly brought them almost to a boil:Before "canning" the cherries, I ladled off a lot of the liquid to be canned separately as "jelly" (I checked that it actually would gel first). Here's the final result of our work:That's 6x300ml jars with primarily cherries, 3x500ml jars with a higher ratio of liquid to cherries, and 4x300ml jars with "jelly". If these things survive, we'll have makings for all kinds of nice food. I'm particularly looking forward to Wildzeit (when game is available)... there was something in the flavor of the cherries that just screamed "venison!!!". I say "if", because I'm I'm always a bit wary of preserving and there's added uncertainty this time since I haven't used the plastic-foil sealing method before. The jars are definitely still holding some vacuum, so we'll see.

The total processing time, including cleaning and pitting the cherries and doing the canning, was about 2 hours.