fresh cherry recipes

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Cherry Oh Cherry Oh Baby!

Posted by spoonandshutter on June 7, 2012
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The cherries came back. The bright red fruit covering the tree in our front yard that caught me so by surprise exactly two years ago  has – oh happy day – returned. And this time, there’s no guessing about what kind of cherries they are.

The cherry tree was given to Ted by his (now our) dear friend, William Clayton, after Ted’s father Bob Axelrod died in 2000. They named it Bing, for Bing Crosby, in a tribute to Bob’s longtime love of Big Band and jazz.

In June 2010, when I first looked out our front windows to see Bing festooned with fruit. I was thrilled, thinking they were the hard-to-find sour cherries of my childhood.

I rushed out to pick them and gathered enough to make a sour cherry pie.

A few days later, I noticed that the remaining cherries had darkened to a deep purplish red. These weren’t sour cherries, they were, of course, bings! We climbed precariously high to collect as many as we could to bake into a classic clafouti (from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking) which we shared with friends at a Sunday afternoon party.

Last year, there were no cherries at all -  I figured the birds had gotten wise enough to get them all early.  Or perhaps Bing is some sort of biennial cherry tree …

This year, because Bing has grown, we got out the BIG ladder. I greedily picked them before they were fully ripe, fearing to lose them to the birds, and baked another clafouti, this one from Dorie Greenspan’s fabulous book “Around My French Table.” Her recipe – as authentic as Julia’s but richer, due to heavy cream – says to leave the cherries whole, but I didn’t dare, worrying someone might crack a tooth. I also wanted to make sure there were no surprises (i.e. bugs) inside and while I’ll spare you the details, I’m glad I checked.

Dorie Greenspan’s Cherry Clafoutis

Serves 6

1 pound sweet cherries, pitted (make sure they weigh a pound after you pit them – pre-pit weight is probably about 1 ½ pounds.

3 large eggs

½ cup sugar

Pinch of salt

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

½ cup all-purpose flour

¾ cup whole milk

½ cup heavy cream

Confectioners sugar, for dusting

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Generously butter a 9-inch deep-dish pie pan (or another baking pan with a 2-quart capacity).

Put the cherries in the pie pan in a single layer

In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs until they’re foamy, then add the sugar and whisk for a minute or so. Whisk in the salt and vanilla. Add the flour and whisk vigorously – usually you should be gentle when incorporating flour, but this is an exception – until the batter is smooth.

Still whisking (less energetically), gradually pour in the milk and cream and whisk until well blended. Rap the bowl against the counter to knock out any bubbles and pour the batter over the cherries.

Bake the clafoutis for 35 to 45 minutes, or until it’s puffed and lightly browed and, most important, a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Transfer the clafoutis to a cooling rack and allow it to cool until it’s only the least bit warm or comes to room temperature.

Dust the clafoutis with confectioners sugar right before you bring it to the table.

And yes, Julia’s recipe is for “clafouti,” Dorie’s is “clafoutis.”

Cherries, Chapter Two – And a Delicious Sunday Afternoon

Posted by spoonandshutter on June 10, 2010
Posted in: Kitchen, Out & About. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 2 comments

All hands on deck in the Nicotra kitchen

Chef Fortunato Nicotra

Food writer David Bonom

Alex Berlingeri

From Susan: Parties at our friends’ Fortunato and Shelly Nicotra,are always a wonderful blend of incredible food and interesting, dynamic people. Sunday’s get-together was no exception. The kids splashed in the pool while the grown-ups sipped an assortment of terrific wines brought to the party by Alex and Smadar Berlingeri of Wine Sources and Marc and Susan Davis of Domaine Select, while nibbling on Fortunato’s enticing array of antipasti: seafood salad, mozzarella burrata with black heirloom tomatoes, cured venison with cherries, zucchini  in a mint vinaigrette, eggplant caponata. In addition to the other fun guests, I was delighted to meet well-known food writer Marge Perry and her husband, writer and recipe developer David Bonom.

Seafood risotto

Smadar Berlingeri stirs the pot - of risotto that is!

The first course, eaten casually indoors while a rain shower passed through, was one of the chef’s inventive risotti – the broth was soft-shell crab “jus” infused with ginger and the finished risotto was studded with plump pieces of calamari and shrimp.

Filet ready to grill

Spring vegetable and mint mash

Fresh-from-the-garden lettuce

The “main” part of the meal was perfectly simple. Grilled filet of beef and Argentine sausages, a “mash” of fava beans, peas, asparagus and mint and a salad of lettuces from the Nicotra’s garden.

Pitting cherries

The clafouti ready to bake

I was honored that Fortunato had asked me to bring the dessert, and embarking on Chapter Two of my cherry saga (read Chapter One here), made the classic French dessert clafouti. Simple and easy to make, it can be prepared with any fruit, but dark sweet cherries are traditional, and especially luscious. Oh, and everyone loved the Sour/Bing cherry pie, too!

What's a dinner party without beignets?

Fortunato with Susan Davis

Just like a zeppole!

At least an hour later, Fortunato was back at the stove – the side burner on the grill, actually – cooking up, of all things, beignets. Some had brought a box of Cafe du Monde beignet mix and he was intrigued. We all agreed that taken out of the context of New Orleans and unaccompanied by cafe au lait, they were really just like Italian zeppole – a delicious guilty pleasure.

Clafouti - a simple and sensational cherry dessert

Clafouti

3 cups pitted black cherries, any juice drained

1 1/4 cups whole milk

1/3 cup granulated sugar

3 eggs

1 tbsp. vanilla extract (not a misprint!)

1/8 tsp. salt

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 350. Butter a 7-8 cup fireproof baking dish or Pyrex pie plate about 1 1/2 inches deep.

Place the ingredients in a blender jar in the order in which they are listed. Cover and blend at top speed for 1 minute.

Pour a 1/4 inch layer of batter on the bottom of the baking dish and set over moderate heat for a minute or two until a film of batter has formed. Remove from heat and spread the cherries evenly over the batter and sprinkle 1/3 cup sugar over them. Pour on the rest of the batter and smooth the surface with the back of a spoon.

Bake for about an hour, until clafouti has puffed and browned and a knife stuck into its center comes out clean. Allow to cool before serving warm or at room temperature; sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving.

Recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck


A Very Local Pie

Posted by spoonandshutter on June 7, 2010
Posted in: Kitchen, Our House. Tagged: , , , , . 4 comments

A cherry tree grows in Montclair

From Susan: To paraphrase the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” – when life gives you a tree full of cherries in your front yard, make cherry pie …

My maternal grandparents’ yard in Beaver Falls, Penn. included, among other fascinations, several sour cherry trees. These were the source of wonderful pies and perhaps even more of a personal favorite, stewed cherries – delicious ladled over vanilla ice cream. My parents have carefully nurtured a sour cherry tree in their coastal Maine garden, surrounding it with a fence to keep out the deer and draping it with netting to foil the birds. The reward for all of this attention is a continuation of the cherry baking and stewing traditions that my mother, and subsequently her children, recall so fondly from our childhoods.

Our front yard here in Montclair, New Jersey, also has a cherry tree, planted by Ted’s best friend, William in memory of Ted’s father. They named it Bing, to pay tribute to the Big Band music my late father-in-law so adored. We assumed this pretty tree was purely ornamental, until, last week, while having our morning coffee in what we call “the front room,” I looked out the window and saw that Bing was loaded with bright red cherries. I had to know if they were, indeed, bings – or sours – so turned to the Internet, which told me that bing cherries grow primarily in Michigan and both male and female trees are needed to propagate and produce fruit. Since we only have one tree and sour cherries are far more common in this part of the country, I assumed that’s what they were. My son, a friend and I picked a colander full and because I couldn’t reach my mother, I found what looked like a great recipe for a sour cherry pie in the U.S.A. Cookbook by Sheila Lukins. It calls for the filling to be cooked slightly, and the thickener is flour; my mother’s recipe, I learned after the fact, uses tapioca and does not require pre-cooking the cherries. Of course any cherry pie recipe requires that the cherries be pitted, which I discovered is not at all an unpleasant task when done outdoors on a beautiful summer evening accompanied by someone you love and a glass or two of chilled sauvignon blanc …

Fruit of our labors

The cherry pie filling before it came to a boil and thickened

Sour Cherry Pie

Pie dough for a double crust in a 9-inch, deep-dish pie plate  (I confess I used Pillsbury unroll-and-bake, which to my mind, is perfectly fine in a pinch, good, even!)

6 cups pitted sour cherries

2 cups sugar

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. almond extract

1 large egg white, lightly beaten with 1 tbsp. water

Combine the cherries, sugar, flour and almond extract in a large saucepan. Stir well and bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat. Boil for 1 minute, stirring to keep mixture from sticking. Remove from heat, and cool to room temperature. (I hurried this process along by pouring the filling into a Pyrex bowl and putting in the fridge for about 15 mins.)

Preheat the oven to 400. Line the pie plate with the bottom crust. Brush with some of the egg white mixture to prevent sogginess, then spoon the filling into the shell. Cover with top crust, fold edges under and pinch to seal. Cut decorative designs or simple slits into the top to let steam escape. Bake on the middle rack of the oven until the filling is bubbly and the crust is golden brown – about 45 minutes. Let cool before serving warm or at room temperature.

Sour / Bing cherry pie

That was Chapter One of my cherry story … Chapter Two begins two days later when, again over coffee in the front room, I look at the cherry tree and see that the cherries are much darker now. I pick one, and it’s quite sweet – Bing has lived up to his name! I had planned to bake a second pie – using my mother’s recipe this time – and take both to an afternoon party at our friends the Nicotras. But I didn’t want to make a bing cherry pie, so settled instead on another classic dessert. Stay tuned for more on what I baked and the rest of chef Fortunato Nictora’s party menu when Cherries, Chapter Two continues tomorrow …