Sour Cherry Pickles

On Thursday I came home from the South Wedge Farmers Market, started throwing things into a jar, and ended up with Sour Cherry Pickles!

When I saw pickling cukes for sale at the market for only $2, I bought them without a thought as to what other ingredients I had at home to pickle them with.  I figured for that price, it was worth just doing them in a salt water brine if I had to.  When I found out I only had a little garlic and a small amount of dill on hand, I though "good enough", and planed to add them to the jar and call it a day.  Then, remembering a tip from "Wild Fermentation" to add cherry leaves to the jar which uses their tannins to keep the pickles crisp, I started digging through the fresh sour cherries I had also gotten from the market.  But to my disappointment (and probably every other cherry purchasers delight), the farmer had picked them clean of leaves.

Not to be deterred, I recalled from my Wines of the World courses in college (you read that right, I took classes on wine to get my engineering degree.  College was awesome!) that leaving the stems and seed in the grapes during wine fermentation adds tannins as well.  My first thought was to pull the stems and seeds out of some sour cherries and put them in the jar, until a stroke of genius (or really laziness) struck and I decided it was much easier to put the whole damn cherries in and find out what happens.



What ended up going into the jar is what you see above, minus about a 1/4 of the cukes that wouldn't fit (I ate them in a salad).  For the cherries, I used the very well measured amount of a handful-ish, making any attempt at scaling this up into a larger batch in the future very difficult for me.  For the brine, I used a sour brine of 3 tablespoons salt per 1 quart water (5.6% for those of you that are into percentages).

I jammed everything in the jar, got all excited, and proceeded to tell my wife how I just broke new ground in the fermentation business!  Oddly, she wasn't as enthusiastic.



The picture on the left is the jar right after it was packed, and the one on the right is the now wonderfully cloudy jar from a mere 4 days later.  With it being so warm lately, I checked them daily, and on the 4th day I decided to give one a taste to see if they were ready, and to my surprise and excitement, they were!

The greatest compliment I can give them is that they taste like pickles!  Delicious, sour pickles!  The flavor from the sour cherries is there, but only very subtlety and at the finish of the flavor.

Unfortunately, sour cherry season is very short lived, so I'm not sure I'll get a chance to make many jars of this.  But if you get a chance to try them, I hope you like them.  And if this inspires you to try adding something crazy to your ferments, all the better!