For the last few years I've made Cherry Vodka. ll are perfectly pleasant, but none has come close to the very first batch I made and forgot about. The one which we ration, the one which is reminiscent of Christmas Pudding.
I was pruning my cookery books, sneding a lot of them to the Charity Shop, when I re-found my Vodka Cookbook. Leafing through the pages, I found a recipe for Sour Cherry Vodka. It had cinnamon and nutmeg. Was this the recipe I had followed all those years ago?
That's what I'm making.
Eventually I had collected 2 pounds of ripe sour cherries. I rinsed them, and then set up my production line, grateful once again for my impulse purchase of a cherry stoner. When it arrived (many years ago now), it looked flimsy and inadequate. But it wasn't. So much faster than using a manual cherry (or olive or whatever) stoner.
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| From the left: discarded cherry stalks, cherries to be destalked, cherries in the hopper, stoned cherries. At the back, cherries which weren't any good, saved for the chooks. |
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| Some of the cherries weren't as ripe as they should have been, but I was running out of time |
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| De-stalked cherries sitting in the pitter hopper |
Once I had a hopper full, I'd pound through them (note to self: wear an apron. Tee shirt covered in cherry splatter).
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| Some of the de-stoned cherries |
In the end, of the 244 cherries that went through the machine, I had 7 that still had stones in. Of those 7, 4 were my fault (I pushed them through the chute by mistake)
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| Cherry pits |
I crushed the cherries, and added sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. Now it needs to be left for 5 days before I add the vodka.
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| Crushed cherries, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg |
Normally I use a glass Le Parfait jar for this sort of thing. I've just bought a couple of tubs which are BPA free, so I'm trying that.
The tub has been lavbelled (with today's date and the date the next step needs to take place), and put in a dark place.
Fingers crossed.
