Jul 10, 2013 3 min read cherry recipes

Cooking With The Greenmarket: Tart Cherry Lemonade

This past weekend’s Cortelyou Greenmarket was cherry-full and also ridiculously hot, so I picked up a quart of the good stuff from Red Jacket Orchards for $8. Recipes abound for complicated stuff like pies and cheesecakes, but what’s better than lemonade during a crazy-humid week in the 80s? Check out how to use your Greenmarket cherry haul to punch up the traditional citrusy drink below.

For this recipe, you will need:

Three large lemons (or five small ones if you’re juicing by hand)
Half a cup of granulated sugar

Two and a half cups of water for basic lemonade

One cup of water for simple syrup
Two dozen sweet cherries

First, off, make sure you’re not wearing anything too fancy, and that no one has any reason to see you as suspicious, because your kitchen is about to look like a crime scene.

After washing your cherries, pluck off their stems, halve them, and remove their pits. Then combine them with one cup of water and half a cup of sugar in a small saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring with a wooden spoon until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Turn off your burner, and pour the contents of the saucepan through a strainer into a bowl or pot. Use a metal spoon to put pressure on the cherry halves and squeeze out as much juice as you can.

Put the bowl of cherry simple syrup in your freezer for a half hour or until chilled. In the meantime, you can cut and squeeze your lemons. For big ones like these, I was glad to have a juicer with a manual lever. You’ll want to end up with a cup of lemon juice.

When the simple syrup has cooled, pour it into a pitcher with the lemon juice and two and a half cups of cold water. Add ice, a garnish, even vodka (and probably a tiny umbrella), and there you have it: four servings of a fun, colorful version of your standard summer lemonade.

I also think this would be great in ice pop form, in which case you could even leave those smushed cherry halves in. However you do it, enjoy–and if you have a recipe I should try that uses an ingredient from the Greenmarket, give a shout at editor@ditmasparkcorner.com.