We are blessed with a huge tart cherry orchard within a 90 minute drive of us. Northwest Tart Cherry in Mesa, Washington grows the best pie cherries that I've ever had... and they sell them washed, stemmed, and pre-pitted. Most years I get a 4-gallon bucket ($50) and can them for pies and cobblers. A bucket usually nets me 12-13 quarts. This year, though, I still had canned cherries left over, and I had other ideas in mind.
Dried tart cherries are expensive - and flavored ones, even more so. Tart cherry juice is either full of sugar and preservatives, or so puckeringly sour that it's not palatable. So it was time for some experimentation!
Side note: there's always a lot of cherry juice in the bottom of the bucket, since they've been pitted and drain quite a bit on the way home. Normally I use that to top off my canning jars. This time, I strained the juice off the cherries and set it aside to flavor kombucha instead. Tart cherry juice from fresh or canned cherries is amazing in kombucha. If you've tried storebought juice and hated it, don't give up until you've tried some from fresh, frozen or home-canned cherries.
I soaked all of my cherries in a sugar solution, but I don't add as much sugar as commercial plants do. My syrup was 1 part sugar to 2 parts water, rather than the 1:1 recipe I've seen published. The cherries soaked in this syrup, in the fridge, for four days.
I wanted to try out a whole bunch of different flavor add-ins, so many of the cherries were packed into quart jars (filled about halfway), then covered with syrup, and then had flavors added. Some of these were liqueurs; we tried Grand Marnier, rum, Amaretto, vanilla vodka, and a few others. Some were from the spice shelf: dried orange zest, star anise, vanilla. I added steam-juiced black raspberry juice to one batch. Approximately 1/4 c. liqueur was added per quart. I put about a tablespoon and half of orange zest in a pint jar packed 2/3 full of cherries, and about a half dozen star anise in a different pint. Everything was labeled (thank you, K; your handwriting is better than mine), and off to the fridge they went.
Four days later, I drained off the syrup and reserved it for other uses. It makes a lovely addition to drinks; we just made sure the ones with liqueurs were well-labeled so that the kids don't grab them by mistake. The cherries were loaded onto dehydrator trays - also labeled - and set at 135° to dry for about 30 hours or so.
You can see one of the quarts and some syrupy juice behind the dehydrator here:
I just love Northwest Tart Cherry's fruit. Their cherries are always nice and ripe! Next year, I'll probably cut back to 1:3 sugar:water in my syrup; their tart cherries are just that sweet.
I've tried using chalk markers and dry erase markers to label my dehydrator trays. The colors bake into the plastic and stain it permanently; neither alcohol, nor soap, nor baby wipes, nor oxygen bleach, or lemon oil, or anything else I've tried, will take it off. Paper post-its fall off. Plastic post-it tabs for the win.
The ends fully justified the means.
The surprise favorite: Star Anise! It results in dried cherries that taste like those yard-long licorice ropes we used to buy at the roller-skating rink when I was a kid. Absolutely amazing. Amaretto was also a favorite; not a surprise, given how well cherries and almonds pair together. Coconut rum was a bit odd - it almost tasted buttery to me. Next year I'd like to try a spiced rum, and possibly add wine to a few jars as well.
Most of the unflavored (and definitely non-alcoholic!) syrup, which is now really a cherry syrup, went into lemonade for my chorus kids' playdate at the park. It made a really nice cherry lemonade. A couple gallons of that lemonade went into my freezer and will likely make an appearance sometime later this summer or fall.
I found four quart jars of cherries in the bottom of the fridge today, still soaking in syrup, that evaded the initial round-up for dehydrating. So - yet more scientific experiments await. Nothing is going to waste, that's for sure!
There have been several taste-testings and panel discussions held at my kitchen table by eager home scientists volunteering for quality-control lab tests. Nobody has run screaming into the night yet. I may have to hide the jars.
