Maraschino cherries, aside from a rather unpleasant taste and color, have stems but no pits or apparent holes, right?
My 9-year old son is desperate to know how this is accomplished. Does anyone know how commercial pitting can be accomplished without loss of the stem?
Come on, help a Dad out!
I just checked a maraschino cherry with a stem - it has a small hole clean through it, from side to side. The hole is small enough that you could miss it unless you were looking for it.
By the way, your claim that maraschino cherries have an unpleasant taste and odor is clearly incorrect. They are dee-licious. I usually keep a jar in the fridge for random cherry goodness.
On a related topic, a friend of mine in the mass-produced food industry said that the color of maraschino cherries is wholly artificial, because they’re actually bleached to nearly white before having red coloring added to them. This also explains how they do the green ones at christmas time.
Can anyone corroborate this story?
Cherries are pitted by driving a ~3/16" (4 mm) rod through the skin. A slight cupping of the leading face of the rod is nice for snagging the pit, but a sawed off screwdriver, or nail, will do in a pinch. It’s easiest to go in through the stem scar, but, it also works from the side, which leaves the stem intact.
Commercial maraschinos used to be dyed with red #2, but that was replaced with the safer red #4 in the late
This cherry site, implies that manufacturers prefer to avoid bleaching:
But sulfite is still a common ingredient in commercial maraschinos.
This recipe for home made maraschinos uses red, unbleached cherries, plus a hefty dose of food coloring.
Beside the color, the thing which differentiates a jar of cherries, from a jar of maraschino cherries, is the brining of maraschinos with salt and alum.
Oops:
Commercial maraschinos used to be dyed with red #2, but that was replaced with the safer red #4 in the late 70’s.
They also have a dose of almond flavoring, which is what makes them so gosh-darned tasty.
I thought commercial “Maraschino cherries” were originally pie cherries that had been sweetened, died, and flavored with juice from Maraschinos, a Maraschino being a tiny fruit that originated in (I think) Russia. Just to help confuse things, Maraschinos are themselves actually a kind of cherry, but not big enough or tasty enough (on their own) to eat. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Traditionally, maraschino cherries were cherries that were soaked in maraschino, hence the name. Maraschino is an Italian liqueur made from the marasca cherry. But nowadays, they use a non-alcoholic syrup instead.