So after years of reading about sour cherries and how completely transcendent they are, but never seeing any in the markets, I finally ran across some at the Federal Plaza farmer’s market this week, so obviously I bought them.
I pitted them with a star pastry tip (which by the way is a pretty efficient method), and tasted a few of them raw, expecting them to be superpuckery and not really edible, but I really liked them. They’re different from sweet cherries, but in their own tangy way really yummy. I would totally eat them raw as a snack or a dessert. Which is good, because once they were cooked and put into the tart (which by a bizarre miracle actually came out right), they left me mostly cold. I mean, they’re good, but just kind of meh — they taste like a more delicious, fresh version of canned cherry filling. Which I guess is what they are, but still… kind of boring. I don’t really get the hype. I’ll totally buy them again, but next time I ain’t cookin’ ’em.
try a “montmorency” type sauce, which is more of a brown wine sauce with sour cherries.
sour cherries work really well for savory dishes.