How to Salt Cherries and Preserve

Yes! You've heard it right. It's not a joke, a prank or bogus news. We love salted cherries and we want to share it with you. Salted cherries make a wonderful dish when stir fried, and its a common dish up in Giresun.

Giresun is a city up on the Black Sea coast of Turkey and is well known for its hazelnuts and cherries. Giresun was named Kerasos back in antiquity and it took its name from cherry trees. Being the motherland of this wonderful fruit ofcourse it was abundant in the summer, and folk took advantage of preserving it for the winter. This is where we get salted cherries.

Now let's get started to salt our cherries.




Ingredients

• 5kg of cherries. Seperated from their stems and thorroughly washed.
• 6 tablespoons heapful of rock salt
• 4 or 5 lt. sterile glass jar
• 2 lt of water. Boil the water the day before and let it wait.

Directions

1. After seperating the stems, put the stems aside for another recipe for cherry stem tea I'll be giving later on.
2. Fill a large bowl with water and add 3 tablespoons of vinegar and 1he cherries and tablespoon of salt. Add the cherries and let them wait for 15 minutes. This will help clean the agricultural chemicals.
3. Strain the cherries and put 1/3 of the cherries into the jar. Add 2 full tablespoons of rock salt.
4. Add another third of the cherries and another 2 tablespoons of rock salt.
5. Add the rest of the cherries and 2 more tablespoons of rock salt.
6. Close the lid of the jar and shake it, so that the salt mixes with the cherries.
7. Add enough water so that there is 3-4cm left upto the lid.
8. If you can obtain an oval appropriate sized sea rock, wash it and put it in a fridge bag and onto the cherries in the jar. We don't want the cherries to float on top of the water. If you can't find a rock use any other kind of weight.
9. Lay another fridge bag over the mouth of the jar. We don't want any air contact.
10. Close the lid tightly and put somewhere cool and dark.
11. In 10 days your salted cherries will be ready.

Notes

• Keep your jar of salted cherries in a cool and dark place for 3 days, then put it in your fridge.
• Here's how you can sterilize your jar.