Sour Cherry and Chocolate Frozen Yogurt
For a person who makes her own condiments and bakes her own bread, I have a decidedly lazy streak when it comes to certain things. It’s ok, don’t we all, even the overachievers among us? So here’s my confession: I leave laundry in the dryer for days at a time when I can get away with it, I sometimes pay the 20 cent library fine instead of returning a book on a particularly busy day, and I hardly ever pick up sour cherries at the farmers market. Because pitting. And cooking.
Sweet cherries are easy to love in the summer. They are sweet, beautiful, and low-maintenence. Put one in your mouth. Spit out pit. Swallow. Repeat. But sour cherries? They’re not really snackable. Which means that most of the time you have to get your mind around to finding a recipe and turning on the oven. And if you’re cooking or baking them, that means you’ll have to pit them, which can be laborious and messy. But when I saw this box of translucent, ruby red sour cherries at the farmers market, I forgot about all that. They were just too perfect looking. Add shallow (along with lazy) to my list of faults.
After several cherry pitting episodes, you’d think I’d finally suck it up and invest a measly 13 bucks into a good cherry pitter. But that would be too easy, yeah? Besides, this trick has served me relatively well in the past. So I pitted my little container of cherries, trying to embrace the juicy mess as one of those relaxing kitchen tasks, similar to chopping large quantities of vegetables or snapping the ends off green beans. I kind of got there. I think next time I’ll just cave and buy the cherry pitter.
The good news is that the rest of this recipe is so incredibly easy that it made up for the slight inconvenience of pitting cherries. Like ridiculously easy. A quick simmer with some sugar, a dollop of yogurt stirred in, a few minutes in the ice cream maker with some chocolate shavings, and you’re in business. You’re rewarded for your efforts by a creamy, icy, sweet-tart frozen yogurt, studded with dark chocolate goodness. The texture actually most closely resembles a sherbet, really. The tart acidity of the bright cherry flavor against the rich bursts of chocolate on your tongue is a match made in heaven. And remember what we decided about anything with yogurt? Health food.
This fro-yo is basically the perfect light dessert for a hot summer night. It’s refreshing, simple, and basically perfect in every way. You need to make this soon. Don’t be lazy. Or be lazy- you don’t have to fold the laundry- but just make this!
Sour Cherry and Chocolate Frozen Yogurt
You can leave out the chocolate if you're not into it, but... you should see someone about that.
Ingredients
- 1 pound fresh sour cherries, stemmed and pitted
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt
- 3 oz dark chocolate, shaved, or cut into very small slivers
Instructions
- Put cherries in a medium saucepan with the sugar. Cover, bring to boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring frequently, and smashing up the cherries a bit with the back of your spoon. Cook until cherries are cooked through. Remove from heat and cool a bit before stirring in the yogurt.
- Cool completely before putting the mix in your ice cream maker. Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the machine directions. When it's almost completely frozen, added the chocolate slivers into the ice cream maker and allow the machine to mix them all in before putting the frozen yogurt into a container and storing in the freezer.
- This frozen yogurt will freeze pretty hard, so before serving, let it sit on the counter for 15-20 minutes, and you should be able to get decent scoops out, and it'll be nice and creamy.