I harvested another 7 pounds of sour cherries from my lone tree yesterday. I’ve plucked 18 pounds so far, and it looks like I’ve barely started. This seems likely to be another bumper crop year for cherries.

I’m down to my last small jar of Bourbon-Infused Smoked Cherries from last year, so I smoked my first cherry harvest and now have a new half-gallon jar infusing in my unheated mudroom. When I plan to use freshly smoked cherries without infusing them in alcohol, I let them chill in the refrigerator for a couple of days first so that their flavor becomes more even. I also have a few bags of unsmoked sour cherries left from 2025 in the freezer. All of these cherries, whether raw and fresh or frozen, recently smoked, or in bourbon, taste delicious in clafouti, the easy French pudding cake I share this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon.

Learn more about making this rustic pudding cake and get the complete recipe for Smoked Cherry Clafouti in my column.

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Twice as Tasty

Last winter, I pulled some of my sour cherry harvest from the freezer, drained off the juice for cocktails, and dehydrated the fruit to use instead of dried cranberries in Smoky Oatmeal–Cranberry Cookies and Cranberry-Orange Quick Bread. It worked so well that this year I’ve transferred some cherries straight from the smoker to the dehydrator.

A few will also end up buried in flaky kosher salt to sprinkle on baked goods, grilled vegetables, and more. I use the same technique that creates Salt-Preserved Herbs and Herb-Infused Salt to make this smoked cherry salt.

I canned a lot of last year’s tart cherry bumper crop, but I still have enough jars left of cherry–raspberry jam, rhubarb and sour cherry grilling sauce, Smoky Sour Cherry–Tequila Salsa, chocolate tart cherry preserves, and roasted tart cherry syrup that I won’t repeat those batches this year. I am planning to can pie cherries this season. I’ve been experimenting with pectin in the jars to thicken the fruit and learned that I get the best filling consistency if I instead thicken the juice on the stovetop before I bake it into the pie. So I’ve settled on simply canning whole pitted cherries in syrup.

Cherries canned in syrup also can be swapped out for frozen raw or smoked cherries and smoked cherries stored in bourbon in many baked goods. Here are just a few recipes on the blog that, like clafouti, I enhance with smoked cherries. You can find more in the recipe index.

• Sour Cream and Cherry Scones
• Swapped for nuts in Zucchini Bread with Sesame Seeds
• Instead of rhubarb in Huckleberry–Rhubarb Galette or Rhubarb–Apple Crisp
• As a sweet topping on Herb-and-Salt Sourdough Focaccia

You can also learn more about canning cherries and other fruit on this blog page.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.