A Surfeit of Cherries

As the all-too-brief cherry season comes to an end, I found myself in the enviable position of having too many cherries, since the CSA gave us two weeks of sweet and sour cherries this month.  What to do with this abundance?  For the sweet cherries, the answer was simple: eat them by the handful.  But what about the sour cherries?

Sour cherries are often used in baking, as you can see in Christine Loughran’s post about cherry cobbler.  Sour cherries shine in pies, cobblers, turnovers, and tarts.  But, our latest cherry delivery coincided with a four-day heat wave.  So, turning on the oven was the last thing I wanted to do!

The answer?  Cherry curd.  A curd is a custard usually made with sour or tangy fruits such as lemon (and other citrus), berries, or even mango or pineapple. 

Today’s recipe uses both sour cherries and lime.  After making my own curd for a few years now, I find that many fruit curd recipes are unnecessarily complicated and fussy.  A food processor and a fine sieve help streamline the process.

Sour Cherry Curd

Ingredients

1 pint sour cherries

1 lime

1.5 cups sugar

1 stick of butter

4 eggs

Equipment

Cherry pitter

Vegetable peeler

Food processor

Fine sieve

Sauce pan

Instructions

Prepare the fruit:

Wash and pit the cherries, set aside.

Zest* and juice the lime (*Time saving tip: instead of fiddling with a grater, I just peel the lime with the peeler and let the food processor take care of the rest), set aside.

In the food processor, blitz the lime peel and the sugar until the peel is reduced to small flecks.

Add the rest of the ingredients one by one and blitz, making sure each is well incorporated: butter, all 4 eggs, cherries, lime juice.

Pour the mixture into a sauce pan and cook on low heat until it thickens.  This can take 5 – 10 minutes, depending on your stove.  When it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, remove from heat.

 

Strain the mixture using a fine sieve and let it cool completely before putting in the fridge.  The curd should keep for 5 days.

Use the curd as a topping for yogurt (pictured) and ice cream, filling for tarts or between layers in cake, or even like jam on toast, biscuits, or muffins. 

Happy eating!