They are not produced commercially on a wide scale, nor are they carried by most supermarket chains. Unfortunately, they are as hard to find as they are remarkable to cook with. These 'sweet cherries' may be wonderful eaten out of hand or tossed in a fruit salad, but they make bland preserves and flat, watery pies.Ĭooking is where sour or 'pie' cherries come in.

Most commercially produced cherry varieties, such as Bing and Queen Anne, do not cook well.

The aroma doesn't fade, as one would expect rather, the longer they cook the more it gains body and roundness, until the cherry fragrance becomes overwhelming, the fruit flavor more pronounced and the overall results unforgettable. Tart as vinegar, with a faint perfume of fresh fruit when raw, they need just a touch of sugar, then start them cooking and watch the tartness blossom. Unlike many fruits, which are at their best uncooked, sour cherries need a bit of sweet and heat to reach their peak. Some farms in Maryland started harvesting and selling only this past weekend, while Virginia may be running low.īut don't let their brilliant glow mislead you into downing these cherries right off the tree. Bursting forth in parts of Virginia just a week or two before the Fourth, the harvest moves northward, and they will be gone from the area before the last strains of the 'Marseillaise' bring Bastille Day to a close. I like their sweetness, their color and their juicy cherry flavor, so that is what I usually default to when baking things like cherry pie.In a world where raspberries appear picture-perfect in the middle of winter and watermelons premiere before the first crocus has had a chance to peek through the snow, sour cherries remain stubbornly seasonal. I personally prefer baking with sweet cherries and will always specify if I go out of my way to use tart cherries instead. Just as when baking with apples, however, there are people who like all different textures in their finished fruit (and “mushy” to some can be “very tender” to others) as long as a great flavor comes through. Some sweet cherries, like rainier cherries, can lose a little bit of their texture when baked. A recipe that specifically calls for sweet cherries may need some extra sugar if you are using sweet cherries. A recipe that specifically calls for tart cherries may have extra sugar added to it. When baking with cherries, most of the time you can use either sweet cherries or tart cherries as long as you pay attention to the sugar content of the recipe so that your baked goods end up balanced. Some recipes will call specially for tart cherries and others will not specify which type of cherry should be used. This is because that tartness can be balanced with additional sugar to bring out the cherry flavor in a fruit that isn’t quite as delicious on its own as a sweet cherry. Instead, they are used for juice and called called for in recipes for everything from pies to preserves. Tart cherries have a sharp, tart flavor and are not typically eaten as is. Bing, rainier and sweetheart are just of the more common varieties of sweet cherries out there. Sweet cherries, or dark cherries, have a much sweeter flavor and are the type of cherries that you’ll see sold in bulk for eating out of hand. There are two main types of cherries out there: sweet cherries and tart cherries.

Sweet cherries bitter two farm stands