Success? Preserved Cherries: Pickled, in Vanilla Red Wine Syrup, in Chai Brandy Syrup, in Rosemary Honey

Sunday, August 5, 2018

When cherries go on sale for $1.88/lb in early July, what else can you do aside from buy 13 lbs?! And then when they go on sale a couple weeks later for $1.77/lb, why not buy 10 more pounds?
It's pretty much how we ended up with sweet cherry butter and brandied cherries last time. This time I swapped out the butter for pickled cherries and used red wine instead of brandy to make cherries in red wine syrup...and then when we bought more cherries, I made brandied cherries, a second round of pickled cherries, and then cherry preserves in rosemary honey! We're going to have summer year round.

The one thing I would do differently is...to use less spice in the preserves and more spice in the pickles.

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Cherries in Red Wine Syrup

4lbs for 5.5 pints cherries in red wine syrup (7 half pints + 2 pints) from Marisa McClellan's Food in Jars, although MorselsAndSauces has a comparable recipe available online.

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Cherries in Chai-Brandy Syrup

4lbs for 6 pints cherries in brandy inspired by Marisa McClellan's book, Food in Jars. I basically started with MorselsAndSauces' comparable recipe for red wine cherries (above), but swapped brandy for the wine and instead of vanilla I threw together a bunch of chai and mulling spices into a double tea ball. Ginger, cardamom pods, cloves, allspice berries, cinnamon, etc. etc. I suspect the flavor will be a bit strong, but maybe that will make them good for Xmas? Next time, maybe only use a single tea ball? I think you could also get away with using less brandy (and using more lemon juice instead). These are going to be boozy.

For the cherry in booze recipe, I always have to make an additional half batch of syrup to fill all the jars (probably because I tend to use smaller jars). Barely any brandy was leftover, so I just turned the whole bottle into syrup and now I have a chai-brandy simple syrup!

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Pickled Cherries

2.5lbs for 4 pints pickled cherries (4 half pints + 2 pints) from Marisa McClellan's Food in Jars, although she has a similar-ish recipe for pickled cherries up on her blog. These are...interesting. I tried them at 2 weeks, and they are good with goat cheese. They don't taste much like vinegar, but they also don't taste much like cherries. I'll be interested to see how the flavor changes after a month or so of sitting. Could probably do with less pickled cherries next time and maybe make sweet cherry balsamic jam instead.

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Cherry Preserves in Rosemary Honey

2.5lbs for 2 pints cherry preserves in rosemary honey syrup (3 half pints + 2 pints) from Marisa McClellan's blog, Food In Jars. I used half regular honey, half rosemary honey and then I added in a couple nibs of dried rosemary I had in a jar. Probably could've done without the dried bits, as now the rosemary is quite overpowering...and the rosemary needles are not enjoyable to remove. Next time just boil them in the mix inside of a tea bag!

Perhaps the rosemary flavor will mellow with time?!