Freezing Cherries and My Favorite Cherry Pitter

This time of year you can find cherries on sale and I recently found organic cherries for just $.99/lb. It was such a good deal I bought a bunch.

I think in the two trips, I made  to the store I ended up purchasing about 12 pounds of cherries. But our family can’t eat that many cherries before they go bad. So I wanted to store up some of that cherry goodness for those dark winter months when summer seems so far away.

In the past I have canned cherries but the texture leaves something to be desired, but when canning, you don’t have to pit the cherries so that is a plus. This year I decided to give freezing cherries a try.

Since I am planning on us eating these little frozen spheres of yumminess, from a slightly thawed state or used frozen in smoothies, I knew I would need to pit them.

Pitting them can seem like a daunting job with 8 pounds of cherries to pit. But I was in luck my husband had purchased me a nifty little cherry pitter that works wonderfully and I was able to pit all 8 pounds in about an hour.

The process for prepping the cherries for the freezer is really fairly easy. Just wash and stem the cherries.

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Now comes the fun part pitting the cherries. If you want to see how to pit a cherry with a paper clip watch my video below. Also I show in the video how easy it is to pit a cherry using my favorite cherry pitter.

Once the cherries were all pitted I cut some in half and left some whole. My thinking was the half cherries would work really well in smoothies as they would blend up better and the whole cherries would be great to thaw slightly and then eat. I had to try a few once they were frozen and I have to say they taste like a cherry slushy but better.

I put the cookie sheets with the cherries on them into the freezer and froze them overnight. Probably an hour or two would have been enough but I forgot about them until morning. 🙂

Place the frozen cherries into freezer bags and be sure to label them.

I always think I am going to remember what’s in those freezer bags but I don’t, that how I got pureed pumpkin confused with peaches. 🙂  So be sure to label the freezer bag with the item’s name and date too.

What new food are you preserving this year?