My Favorite Sour Cherry Recipes For a Sweet Summer
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Sour cherry season is upon us.
This fleeting window when sour cherries are ripe for the picking–typically from late June through early July here in New Jersey–is truly my favorite fruit season.
And it’s for this reason that I have so many sour cherry recipes at the ready, because when it comes to experimenting with these beauties, I just can’t help myself.
If you’ve ever tasted a sour cherry, you know the name is accurate. Unlike their sweet siblings, these tart and translucent fruits aren’t meant for eating fresh off the tree.
You’ll enjoy them most in baked goods like pies and pastries, or in other recipes that combine them with a little bit of sweetener to balance out their intense flavor.
If you’re lucky to live near a pick-your-own orchard, make room in your freezer and pick as many sour cherries as you can handle.
Pitted and stored in airtight bags, they’ll keep for months.
You’ll also find sour cherries at local farmers markets throughout the country, though if you don’t live in the upper swath of the United States, they might be a little pricier.
Most sour cherries are grown in Michigan, Utah, New York, and Washington state, but you’ll see them at smaller farms in any region with colder winters and temperate-ish summers. (Ugh, climate change.)
When I finally get the backyard of my dreams, I hope to plant a sour cherry tree and have my own personal harvest every year.
But until then, I’ll content myself with picking up to 10 pounds of cherries every summer at my local New Jersey orchard.
And I’ll keep cranking out the sour cherry recipes until I can no longer hold a pitter in my shriveled hands.
Take a look below at some of my favorite ways to cook with sour cherries, and stay tuned each year for more delicious experiments!
My Favorite Sour Cherry Recipes
Make the most of the summer with sour cherry recipes that celebrate the fruit's brief season. Or save a few bags of cherries in your freezer to enjoy these treats year-round!
You can make this pie with either sweet or sour cherries, but we all know which one I'm going to choose.
When you've got fresh sour cherries and peaches, go big with a pie baked in a deep dish casserole or pie pan. This one is for the fruit lovers!
Sour cherry polenta cake is your new favorite summer snacking cake. Stone-ground cornmeal gives it a crunchy texture that pops against those juicy cherries.
Sour cherry pierogies from my cookbook Pierogi Love: New Takes on an Old-World Comfort Food are one of my most favorite ways to update a classic recipe.
Goat cheese sour cherry ice cream? Yes indeed! Pairing fresh sour cherries with tangy goat cheese is a weird but wonderful match.
Homemade cherry sno cone syrup is a fantastic way to use up fresh sour cherry juice for slushees and other frozen treats.
Freeze a bag of sour cherries and save them to make this cherry cranberry pear pie for the holidays. It's a sweet-tart pairing that's worth the wait.
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Casey Barber
Casey Barber is the owner and founder of Good Food Stories LLC and a visual storyteller whose work often focuses on the intersection of food and culture. She is also the author of the cookbooks Pierogi Love: New Takes on an Old-World Comfort Food and Classic Snacks Made from Scratch: 70 Homemade Versions of Your Favorite Brand-Name Treats, and she couldn’t get anything done without the help of her executive assistant cats, Bixby and Lenny. Her favorite color is obviously orange.