How to Freeze Cherries

This is twelve pounds of cherries.  Guess how much I paid for them.  Keep in mind that in the last basket breakdown, they were $2.98/lb at my Walmart. 

Did you guess?

Did you guess that they were $.99/lb? 

Well, you were right!  These are on sale this week at Jack’s Market, a local grocery store in Monte Vista.  These five bags were a total of about twelve pounds and I froze four of the five bags.

Start by washing them.  I just rinsed them off in the colander.



Then I pitted them.  I bought this handy dandy cherry pitter last year and it works like a champ.  I thought it was kind of a splurge, but now I don’t know how I made it through a summer without it. 

Image courtesy of Williams Sonoma

If you don’t have one of those, just use a knife to cut them in half and pit them that way.  This process also goes faster if you have a little person to pull the stems off of the cherries.  I guess a big person could do it, too, but I usually have at least one little person begging to help. Make sure that you get the pit completely out of the cherries.  The last thing you want is to put some in a smoothie with the pit still in. 

Once you have them pitted, lay them out on a cookie sheet.  I didn’t use wax paper underneath like I do for freezing bananas because they come off a whole lot easier.

Pop them in the freezer for at least a few hours.  It is possible that I’ve left them for days and they are always good and frozen at that point. 

Use whatever size of freezer bags you want and bag them up.  I had quart size bags, so that what I used.  I got about five and a half quarts out of four bags.  I need to come up with something to do with the leftover bag.

Now you have cherries to put in smoothies, desserts, syrup, or whatever else.  They are also quite tasty to just eat right out of the bag, frozen and all.