Praew and I spent the last week harvesting Thai cherries off the ground each morning and then experimenting with different dishes over the course of the day. It was a very interesting culinary week. 🙂

Last week I posted about our Thai cherry tree harvest and the possibility that Thai cherries are a “superfood”. So the question then became, “what can we do with it?” Besides popping them in the mouth and eating the sour buggers raw. (Which is enjoyable in moderation… but don’t eat them after anything sweet. They taste too sour then.)

First we started with a “Thai cherry and banana cake”. The basic recipe was from these strawberry banana muffins, but we replaced the strawberries with Thai cherries. It was surprisingly good. The sour tartness of the Thai cherries gave a burst of flavor I don’t think the original strawberry recipe would have.

The next one was the most interesting. Praew saw a reference to someone saying that a spaghetti sauce can be made from Barbados cherries (which, as I described in my previous post, is most likely the same thing) by substituting the tomatoes with these cherries. The post said “it was indistinguishable from tomato sauce”. This sounded difficult to believe, but seemed too interesting not to try.

First we experimented with pitting the cherries by boiling and straining them, but this turned out to be something of a mess:

So instead we went back to just squeezing the seeds out like we did for the cake. You just pinch the raw fruit between your fingers, and the seeds basically come out on their own. (Minimal peeling out of the seeds may be required.)

After stewing them for a bit, Praew added our usual spaghetti red sauce ingredients from whatever was in the garden or fridge:

(In this case it had some fresh basil and celery from the garden and purchased mushrooms, onions, and carrots as well as oregano. I may be forgetting one or two ingredients, though.)

Over the pasta it looked pretty much just like a tomato sauce except a slightly lighter color:

How did it taste? Well, it was somewhat more sour than you would expect from a tomato sauce that used canned tomatoes. But I would say it was not all that different from a tomato sauce made from fresh tomatoes where you don’t peel the tomatoes first. (Peeling the Thai cherries is possible, but would involve somewhat more work.)

At first, I thought, “how could a cherry sauce taste like tomatoes?” But then I realized that tomatoes contain citric acid and vitamin C as do cherries, and these cherries aren’t as sweet and fruity as the normal cherries I have eaten from the US Pacific north-west, so it isn’t altogether too crazy when you think about.

Finally, I convinced Praew later in the week to try making a cherry pie for me. I’m not normally a big fan of pies because they are too sugary sweet, but something sour like this ought to create exactly the kind of pie I like.

So Praew just improvised a pie without a recipe:

Technically, it might have actually been a kind of galette since she just folded the crust over, but for all practical purposes, this was the best pie I’ve ever eaten. It was extremely flavorful. Tart but sweetened by sugar. This pie reminded me somewhat of a strawberry rhubarb pie, but with more of a burst of sour than I’ve ever tasted from a restaurant pie.

Today, she will be making Thai cherry scones. But since we might be overdosing on these cherry dishes now, after this I suggested we take the next bunch we harvest, remove the seeds, and freeze it for later baking or cooking purposes.

The harvest from this one tree has already been enough for the banana-cherry cake, a two dish pasta sauce, two pies, and the scones. Not to mention the two or three times I just sat and ate a bunch raw. And all of this is using the fruit that fell to the ground in the last week from a single tree that we only purchased and planted last year. I’m not sure how much more fruit it will give us this season, but this has become one of my favorite fruit trees on our land.

There is something particularly pleasing to eat good food knowing that it came from some oddball fruit that grows in your yard. 😉