Sour cherry compote

One of our favorite things to get at our favorite Nashville restaurant Marche was the cheese plate. It always came with delicious toast points, a beautiful cheese, and a delicious compote of some sort. I was planning on doing some canning this week and was hoping to make orange rhubarb butter. However, my plans changed last-minute and turned into an opportunity to make compote. We were invited over to dinner at the home of a high school friend of mine, who in that “the world is incredibly small” kind of way lives less than 15 miles from our new home (note that we’re over 600 miles from where she and I grew up.) She had a lovely cherry tree in her backyard and graciously allowed us to pick some cherries to take home. So cherry compote it is!

I love canning. In my Ph.D. work I spent a lot of time making a sample that required cooking-like skills in the lab. (In fact, I’m pretty good at making homemade marshmallows – an unexpected plus to my lab work.) So canning to me in some ways feels science-y. Canning was also really important to my grandmother. She passed away a little over a year ago and so I feel that by canning I carry a part of her with me. My dad says she (and my great-grandmother!) would have been proud of me. I didn’t start canning until last summer; it had always intimidated me but after Mamaw passed away I was determined to start. But once you have a few rules down you will be good to go. But please do follow those rules. And be careful to not use outdated information.

My personal favorite canning recipe book is The Complete Book of Year-Round Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Delicious Recipes. I like it because it focuses on canning small quantities of food. Because honestly, it takes a lot of time to can bushels and bushels of food, and unless you have 10 kids or give tons of it away you’re probably going to be left with too much canned goods on your hands.

If you’re going to can you will want to read up on the process elsewhere, but here are a few things that I find absolutely vital:

• Start with a clean kitchen.
• Go through all your equipment and wash it and inventory it before you start. Make sure you have the appropriate number and size of lids for the jars you want to use. Have a few extra lids on hand just in case. (If you are just starting out, I recommend getting the following: water bath canner, a canning starter kit, and some jars. I’m partial to these half-pint cuties, especially for gift-giving.
• Check your jars to make sure they are not chipped or cracked. Run them through the dishwasher before starting.
• Lay out all your materials ahead of time (like you would if you were working in a lab, actually!)
• Be flexible but on-task. Don’t plan to fold laundry or check email or anything during the process.
• Have a chair nearby to sit down when you are able.
• Wear an apron.
• Label everything when you are finished.

Now to the compote. I was excited to make some compote, not only to give to my friend in thanks for giving us the cherries but also to have on hand when we have guests in the future so we can make a lovely cheese plate. The recipe is from the book I mentioned above. I didn’t see any reason to buy a whole bottle of kirsch just to use a bit in one recipe, so I omitted it with no problems.

A note about pitting cherries: it would have been nice to have a cherry pitter on hand, but I didn’t so I tried two different methods. One I’ve read about is to use a chopstick to push the pit through the cherry. In fact, I have an ideal chopstick for this:

It (along with the other in the pair) was a gift from my best friend when she went to Japan. Doesn’t it look like it was made for pitting cherries? Alas, it was not an efficient process. So I took to using a paring knife and cutting around the pit, much like you would when you cut open an avocado, then opening the cherry and pulling the pit out.

Cherry Compote

Makes 3 cups

Ingredients:

1 cup dry red wine
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp lemon juice
4 cups fresh or frozen pitted sour cherries
1 Tb cornstarch
1 Tb water
1 Tb kirsch

Directions:

1. Place wine, sugar, and lemon juice in a medium sauce pan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring to dissolve sugar. Add cherries; return to a boil. Reduce heat and boil gently, uncovered, for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. Remove hot jars from canner. Remove cherries from liquid with a slotted spoon; pack into jars. Continue simmering syrup until it is reduced to 2/3 cup.
3. Stir together cornstarch and water; stir into syrup. Return to a boil and boil gently for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in kirsch.
4. Pour syrup over cherries to within 1/2 inch of rim. Process 15 minutes for half-pint jars and 20 minutes for pint jars.

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