North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Stephen Sadler" <Docshiva@Docshiva.org>]

The best way to keep the color of sour cherries for pie is to make the pie
filling from fresh and then can it.  You should be able to find a recipe for
cherry pie filling for canning, or I can post one.  Basically, you cook up
the filling ingredients except lemon juice and cherries until thick, add the
lemon juice and cherries, cook a minute, put into jars and BWB 25 minutes,
pints or quarts.  Canned filling has good color.  You can add red food
coloring at 5 drops per quart, if you wish.  It's also handy - you can whip
up a pie in no time with a purchased crust, or speed the process with
homemade crust, or make crumbles, dumplings, turnovers, buckles, grunts, or
cherry cheesecake.  

You can dry pack and get some better color by freezing stemmed, washed,
drained, pitted cherries on a baking sheet (or for best color, flash freeze
with dry ice in a cooler box); then vacuum seal and put in the deep freeze.
They'll hold better and longer, with less discoloration - but not
necessarily 'cherry red'.  

You can also wet pack your prepared cherries by stirring 3/4 cup sugar with
each quart of fruit, or place in rigid freezer containers and cover with a
cold sugar syrup. Wet packing will improve the frozen color, and you can
color up the syrup with red food coloring.  For the sake of full disclosure,
I'll note that I just about never use wet packs.  I dry pack if I want
utility - the cherries can be used for a variety of purposes without
adjusting recipes for the sugar in place; sugar syrup also dilutes the
cherries, although the flavor doesn't really suffer. 

~ Stephen 



-----Original Message-----
From: nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Harrick, Barbara
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 7:37 AM
To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [NAFEX] pie cherries

Hi all. I have 2 dwarf pie cherries--Northstar and Montmorency (on
Gisella 5 rootstock from Raintree). They are compact, full of fruit
(first year I planted!) and easy to net--I just threw the netting over
them and it kept birds and squirrels at bay (and I have some feisty,
resourceful squirrels!) I just made a pie from them that was amazing,
although they tend to freeze a brick red/brown color which is so so, but
taste was great.

Does anyone have experience with a pie cherry that freezes red?

Thanks, Barbara

Barbara Harrick