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Friday, July 5, 2013

Sour cherries: dried, juice, syrup


Another LUrC harvest: this time sour cherries, on a sweltering 4th July afternoon. No equipment (other than plastic bags) this time, and fewer people. Harvesting at one point involved balancing on top of a ~5ft tall  / 6 inch wide gatepost. We split the haul between the four of us. I decided to dry mine - and to test with / without sweetening.

~8 cups of sour cherries, after removing stones and splitting in half
2 cups sugar
2 cups water

Wash the sour cherries and put them in a colander over a bowl. Remove the stone and split each cherry in half (I found it easiest to do this with my fingers). Any juice that comes out will be caught in the bowl and saved: make sure to collect all the cherry juice in this way throughout as it is delicious and must be drunk!

Measure the volume of halved cherries. To sweeten, per four cups of cherry halves, put two cups of sugar and two cups of water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the cherries and simmer gently for ~20 min. Drain (reserve the syrup), and let the cherries cool.

For the unsweetened cherries, pour boiling water over them, let sit for a minute and then drain.

Arrange the cherry halves on dehydrator racks (line with finer mesh if the cherries are on the small side). 8 cups of cherry halves filled 4/5 racks. Dehydrate at 135F. The sweetened ones took approx. 12 hours; the unsweetened ones took a bit longer.

For cherry syrup, boil the reserved sugar syrup until reduced by about half. It will be a rich cherry red, and very sweet, although with some cherry taste.

I ended up with about 400ml of cherry juice (one glassful).

2014 cherry season: This time I dried without boiling water or sweetening. Just took the stones out of the cherries and laid them out in the dehydrator. They came out just fine, whether laid face down or face up. Took a bit longer - maybe 16 hours.

The dried cherries came out great. They are little: look like dried cranberries, and with a similar texture. Both sweetened and unsweetened are delicious. The sweetened ones are more easily munchable, and taste just like the bought kind (except more intense). The unsweetened ones have more of a sharpness, but not uncomfortably so: perhaps this is more exciting. Not sure why unsweetened took longer to dry, but they did.
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