Cherry Sauce
Today is Eric’s birthday and Lorraine asked me to get a cheesecake for dessert. I was going to buy a can of cherry pie filling in case anyone wanted sauce on their cheesecake … but there was a good price on fresh cherries so I changed plans.
A search produced a lot of recipes for cherry sauce, but most were far sweeter than I want. My tastes have changed; I prefer desserts that are less sweet
Natasha’s Kitchen has a Cherry Sauce that was exactly what I want!
NOTE: Although I found Natasha’s recipe in a DuckDuckGo search, I have browsed her site in the past and recommend it as a great source for recipes and ideas.
Cherry Sauce
This recipe is Natasha’s — I changed proportions and added commentary regarding how I made it. Her notes go beyond what I did, including adjustments for canned cherries. I recommend reading her notes.
- 1/3 cup water
- 1 Tbsp cornstarch
- 1 Tbsp sugar
- 1 Tbsp lemon juice
- 3 cups pitted cherries
Place the water in a medium saucepan. Stir in the cornstarch, sugar, and lemon juice. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly. Until it boils, the solids will drop out and burn on the bottom of the pan — stir! The mixture will change from milky to translucent.
Add the cherries and stir constantly. Reduce heat to low and continue to stir for a total of 6 minutes.
The original recipe said 6 to 10 minutes, but my stove must be hotter, as 6 minutes was plenty. The sauce will be thick and chunky.
Cool in the pan, then refrigerate until needed.
Pitting Cherries
The teacher asked a small boy, “How do you spell Philadelphia?”
“filladollfea”
“That’s not correct.”
“I know, but you asked me how I spell Philadelphia, and that’s how I spell it.”
This introduces you to my primer on cherry pitting. This is how I do it, and if you have a different method? Good for you! This one works for me.
With fresh cherries, I start at the stem end by cutting all around the cherry, as if bisecting it.
I turn the cherry 90 degrees and do it again, so the cherry is in 4 quarters held together by the pit. The green lines illustrate the cuts.
I twist the cherry so two of the quarters tear off. I twist the remainder so 1 quarter tears off, then using a finger nail, pull the pit out of the last quarter. This goes faster than you might expect, especially with practice. It also produces almost no waste, unlike commercial pitting tools.