New kitchen gadget

With cherry season at its peak right now, I need to find ways to process more of the fruits quickly! Last Saturday at our Summer Fruit meetup, we made a cherry sorbet that was incredible. We used the dark bing cherries that we pitted using my new cherry pit remover gadget, juiced in my Breville Elite juicer, then mixed with a bit of simple syrup I had made ahead that was perfumed with Meyer lemon, and then we froze the sorbet in my Cuisinart ice cream maker. The recipe is a basic sorbet recipe that I use with many different fruits. I use the juice of the fruit I have on-hand in the same proportion each time. Stacy calls it the essence of the fruit. For the cherry sorbet I used kirsch brandy as the spirit, which makes the cherry flavor "pop", while preventing the sorbet from freezing too hard.

The cherry pit remover gadget is a simple tool that makes pitting cherries a snap (olives too, I have been told). It is the Oxo Good Grips cherry pit remover. I bought mine at Sur La Table in San Jose. Here it is on-line for $13. There is one trick to perfect pitting: align the vertical seam of the cherry to the inside toward the handle and make sure the plunger is perfectly aligned where the stem was removed. After a few cherries, I got the hang of it and pitted a whole pound in less than two minutes. Worth every penny!