Getting sweet on sour cherries for health and happiness
Sour hasn't generally been considered a desirable quality in food. A little lip pucker from a tart lemon bar might be tolerable, but for the most part sweet and salty trumped sour on the taste spectrum.
Chefs across the globe are bringing sour out of the shadows, especially as the wave of fermenting and pickling ripples across restaurant menus and sour beers pour into local bars.
So how do you bring sour home and incorporate it into family-friendly recipes? Start with cherries.
Not the deep red, nearly black orbs with names like Bing and Rainier that crowd produce bins in July and August. Sour cherries — the most common kind around here is the Montmorency — are far too delicate to handle the commute from Wisconsin or Michigan to the suburbs.
“They're eye-popping red, but they're too fragile to be transported,” says Wendy Bazilian, a registered dietitian, certified health and fitness specialist and spokeswoman for the Cherry Marketing Institute.
“You will find them frozen, dried and as juice.”
That means that while they reach peak ripeness in the summer like their sweet counterparts, sour cherries are available year round, ready to add to your sauces, stews, smoothies, salads, pies, muffins, trail mix and other recipes.
“We Americans are getting more ambitious on our plates,” Bazilian adds. “Salt and sweet have been over-expressed; sour punctuates sweet and spicy.”
Sour cherries balance spicy pepper and cumin in Cherry Lamb Tagine, tame the salt in Sour Cherry, Bacon and Thyme Salt and keep nutty chocolate chip protein bites from crossing into cookie territory.
“They lend something a little different to recipes that makes you go 'Oh, that was unexpected,'” Bazilian says.
Not only do sour cherries bring joy to our palates — acclaimed food writer Mimi Sheraton cites Hungarian Sour Cherry Soup in her new book “1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die” — sour cherries are good for our bodies.
In his 2013 book “The Best Things You Can Eat” (Lifelong Books), Elmhurst dietitian David Grotto singles out cherries for a variety of nutritional benefits.
The anthocyanins in cherries (the same compound that gives them their red hue), for instance, act as an anti-inflammatory. That means less achy joints for arthritis sufferers and athletes.
“Cherries are a great pre- and post-workout food,” Grotto says, adding that the benefits come not just from the whole fruit but from cherry juice as well.
Bazilian points to cherries' melatonin. Sour cherry juice in a “cocktail” of sparkling water and lime juice or frozen cherries in a smoothie can help you fall asleep and sleep better. And they contain a natural pain reducer, she adds.