Nanking Cherries and Niches

When we moved into this house three years ago, we inherited a very nice fruiting Nanking Cherry hedge. It's very pretty in the spring, has nice dense foliage in the summer, and makes tons of itty bitty "cherries." The problem is, although the cherries have an interesting flavor when freshly picked, they have largish pits for their small size, they are not very strongly flavored and the flesh is very watery. That means they aren't really good for fresh eating, pies, or jam. Most people here grow the bushes as ornamentals and let the birds have all of the fruit. But what we've discovered is they do make a tasty juice, and using the steam juicer to process them seems to concentrate their mild flavor. The resulting juice is good warm or over ice with a touch of sugar to counteract the tartness and bring out even more of the cherry taste.

This year we juiced all of the cherries we picked. We still had a couple of gallons of the juice after drinking our fill of it straight, so I made cherry syrup with some of it and then tipped a bit of vinegar "mother" into one of the partial gallon jugs and let it sit for three months in the storage room. I just took the vinegar out today to check it and POW! That's some great vinegar, if still a bit brash, so I'm letting it sit and mellow out till the end of the year. The other jug sat waiting in the fridge over the summer (it was pasteurized by the steam juicing so it was as good as "canned.") Today I took it out and checked it and then dropped a sterilizing Campden tablet into it just for good measure. Tomorrow I will drop some Montrachet wine yeast in there and let it turn into cherry wine. I have a jug of plum juice from earlier this week sitting right alongside it that will be turning into plum wine at the same time. These will be my first batches of homemade fruit wine. It should be an interesting project! Apple cider vinegar and apple wine are next on the roster. Then it's time to start some meads and beers for the dark winter months.

The thing I like most about this is feeling like I've finally found the best use, a "niche" if you will, for the Nankings. It's a good feeling to take something that is only marginally useful or currently under-used and turn it into something more valuable. We have two sweet cherry trees growing up that will eventually provide us with cherries that are much nicer for eating fresh, making jam and pies, and general canning. But thanks to discovering that niche, the Nankings will always have their special spot in the pantry as vinegar, syrup, juice and wine.