Cooking with Dried Cherries

Cooking How-To, Featured Article, How-To, Ingredient, Recipes
on January 31, 2012
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Mark Boughton/styling: Teresa Blackburn
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There are nearly 28,000 full-time residents of Door County, Wis. Add 20,000 part-time residents and 1 million summer tourists to that, and you have 1.5 million people—still not enough to make a dent in the roughly 12 million pounds of fresh cherries that come in fast and furious each July.

To prolong this precious bounty, residents dry and pack them in bags to use all year. We find dried cherries are best enjoyed in the dead of winter when everyone is in need of a sweet taste of summer. Plump and scarlet, tart and sweet, dried cherries tend to make everything taste better. Toss them in a salad with toasted walnuts, greens and feta cheese, or tuck them into buttery scones.