The Sour Cherry Pie Journey, Part One: The Pits

The above photo is documentation of an event which rarely occurs in the greater Seattle area (or, at least, it's rare in my experience).

I've read and heard about sour cherries enough over the last few months that as soon as I saw the first local cherries at the market, I started scouring every fruit hawker's stand for a glimpse of these fine specimen. Before this year, I had no idea that sour cherries were anything notably different than just...cherries...which happened to be kinda sour. But oh, was I wrong.

You see, sour cherries are the traditional pie cherry. You can make sweet cherry pie, too, but it's not even close to the flavor dimensionality of a sour cherry pie. Or so I was told. In any case, sour cherries got pretty hyped up in my universe, especially since they were nowhere to be found and I heard that they have a shorter in-season availability than other cherries.

So, naturally, when I found myself at the farmer's market a while back (July, I think?), and happened upon a stand with not just one, but TWO different kinds of sour cherries, I accepted the hard fact that a pie was in my future. No sense arguing with reality, y'know?

Of course, there would be some work involved.

Namely, the pitting of the cherries and learning how to make a pie crust.

The pitting wasn't so bad, even if I couldn't use a cherry pitter (the skins of sour cherries are too thin to use a pitter, and besides, I don't even own one!).

It was actually pretty nice to be sitting outside on a sunny Saturday, pitting cherry after cherry. I quite enjoy the occasional monotonous physical task. Annnd maybe I liked having bright red cherry juice running down my wrists, whilst wielding a knife...

Look! Cherry guts!

Stay tuned for Part Two: The Crusty Bits!