Cherry Pitter

Recently I started to crave cherry pie.  I’d rarely eaten cherry pie and had never made it, so I’m not sure where this came from.  Very likely it was a remnant of my RAGBRAI trip, where pie is a staple food group each day along the way.  On the way home from my Iowa adventure, I passed through Ohio, home to Lehman’s – a place with the most awesomeness packed into one store.  It’s a store that caters to the Amish community, which doesn’t use electricity.  They carry lovely old-fashioned items for the home, including all manners of kitchen items to get jobs done without a power cord.  Grain mills, pickling crocks, things for canning, juicing, pressing, grinding, and preserving are all stocked in abundance, many of which are labeled with Lehmans’ signature good, better, best labels of quality.

I drove at least an hour out of my way to drop by and see what wonderful gadgets and other intriguing items I could find, and came home with the Lehman’s Best Cherry Pitter, made by Leifheit.

When I got home, I bought a bunch of cherries and embarked on some serious pitting action.  The pitter’s advertising is strong, armed with the label of Lehman’s “best:”  pit 26 lbs of cherries per hour!  Make prize winning pies!  Automatically lifts the cherries and drops them in your bowl!

It all started out great.  Cherries piled high into the top, waiting to be pitted.  It turns out that the cherry pitting experience with this device was loud, extremely messy, and definitely not foolproof.  Each cherry being pitted makes a loud and startling mechanical thump.  Before I knew it, it looked like there had been a cherry massacre, with juice splattering absolutely everywhere, and my hands covered in red.  There was lots of futzing to get the cherries to fall into the little ditch so the pitter could do its thing, then fishing through all the cherries all over again to find the ones that weren’t actually pitted (turns out this baby has about a 10-15% rate of error…).

It’s much faster than the ones that do one at a time by hand, but the time it takes to go back to make sure you got all the pits makes it not worth it.  To add insult to injury, I learned not long after that I’m not really much of a fan of cherry pie!  Oh well.  It was fun to try.

Posted by robyn on September 8th, 2010 under cooking



One Response to “Cherry Pitter”

  1. Jabba Says:

    There must be an easier way? I saw a cherry-pitter on Angry Chicken a long time ago that looked, well more cute than functional. Her kids were using it, but if a 5 year old can do it then it might be easier than your gadget?
    I LOVE cherry pie. I guess you could buy the filling in a can….not the same.
    .-= Jabba´s last blog ..More Sailing =-.

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I'm Robyn. Thanks for stopping by! This is my craft blog.

Contact me at robyn [at] dognamedbanjo [dot] com.

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