Cherriversary

We passed the one-year anniversary of our move to Portland last week. The first full weekend we were in town, basically as soon as we had a car, I dragged Brian up to the Hood River Gorge and we picked 40 pounds of tart cherries. We pitted them by hand over the next few days and froze them in 9 cobbler-sized portions. I've been slowly using them in pies and cobblers, drying them in the oven, and making syrup from the juice. We're now down to one bag. To mix things up, this year I got a cherry pitter (amazing, best invention ever) and a Presto Dehydro food dehydrator. Sadly, they were out of tart cherries at the orchard so we had to content ourselves with 20 lb. of dark sweet cherries, mostly Lamberts with some Bings. 

2016 cherry haul.

I've only used a real food dehydrator once, to make trail fruits for a backpacking trip in high school. The one I got is pretty similar - round trays stacked over a heat source and fan - and works pretty great. I dried a bag of the frozen tart cherries and a bunch of the new sweet ones. The tart cherries dried a lot faster, the freeze-thaw process releases a lot of juice, but they are pretty beat up from being hand-pitted and frozen. I really like their flavor dried, it's very intense. The pitter did a great job on the sweet cherries, leaving only two small holes. That meant they took close to 30 hours to dry down to a reasonable plump-raisin level. They are milder in flavor than the tart cherries, but still nice. I think I might try coating some with dark chocolate. Yum.

This year's bucket of cherries, and Mt. Hood.

Tart and sweet cherries in the food dehydrator.