Cheery Cherries and The Easiest Way to Pit Them (Video)

How to pit cherries – There are several ways to pit fresh cherries, but here’s easiest way.

It’s cherry season!  My favorite time of the year – besides sweet potato season, blueberry season, and fig season.   I hope you’re enjoying fresh cherries as much as I am.

Cherry Nutrition

The benefits of cherries go far beyond their luscious taste. Here are 6 great reasons to take advantage of cherry season before it slips away.

1. Great for Weight Loss

A cup of cherries contains only 90 calories but offers 3 grams of fiber – which will help you feel full longer and store less fat. Cherries also offer B-vitamins, which help improve metabolism. So they fit beautifully in a weight loss program.

2. High in Antioxidants

Sweet cherries are among the top 20 foods with the highest concentration of antioxidants.

Different Ways to Pit Cherries

Cherries are great eaten fresh out of the hand, but if you want to include them in a recipe – like Cherry Vanilla Ice Cream or Cherry Tapioca Pudding – you probably want to pit them first.

If you look on the web, you’ll see lots of ways to pit this delicious fruit. I’ve seen suggestions for using chopsticks, paper clips, a straw, and, of course, a knife. All of these methods are extremely time-consuming. Soooo sloooow! If all you have is a knife (or chopsticks, paper clips, or a straw), then those methods are better than nothing. But with just a tiny investment, there is a much quicker, much easier way to remove the tiny pits from this luscious fruit.

How to Pit Cherries

As is often the case, the best and easiest way to do something is to use a tool made for the job. To pit cherries, nothing beats a cherry pitter. I can pit hundreds of cherries an hour with my cherry pitter, making it simple and efficient to freeze lots of these luscious jewels so we can enjoy them in the winter months too.

(This video is an example of what can happen when you give my two children a camera and some video editing tools. Not the greatest video, but I heard lots of laughs coming from the other room when they were editing it.)

The cherry pitter I have used to be my grandma’s and you can see it here. It’s at least 30 years old and works great.  But this video was recorded at my parents’ house, so I was using my mom’s pitter, which is this Norpro cherry pitter.  It worked well. (The cherries usually roll down the chute a little better but, of course, not at the particular moment they were being recorded.)

Warning: You probably don’t want to be wearing your new white shirt when playing with a cherry pitter.

How to Freeze Cherries

Now that you can pit hundreds of cherries in less than an hour, you’ll have a huge pile of cherries! You may want to stash some of them away in the freezer so you can have delicious cherries even when it isn’t cherry season!

Frozen cherries on top of my hot Harvest Oats or Pineapple Coconut Rice or Maple Coconut Multi-Grain Cereal are reasons enough to freeze this delicious summertime fruit.

Here’s how to freeze cherries:

1. Use freshly-picked cherries in good condition. Wash fruit and pat dry.

2. Pit cherries.

3. Place cherries in a ziplock bag. (Some like to freeze them on a baking sheet before putting them in plastic bags because this ensures that they don’t freeze together, but I have found they separate easily so I never bother with this step.)

4. Squeeze excess air out of bag, seal, and place in freezer.

Frozen cherries will keep in the freezer for about 10 months.

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