Cherry-coloured Funk - my favourite cherry recipes
I'm completely obsessed with cherries this month, I’m happy in my Cherry-coloured Funk. It is perfect timing as 16th July is NATIONAL CHERRY DAY!!!!!
In all of the recipes I have been creating using cherries, I wanted to make the cherries the star of the show. At The Vegan Chef School that is what we teach our student chefs - to highlight our brilliant seasonal produce by developing recipes to really showcase them. In all of my cherry recipes they all have flavour pairings to increase the cherry-ness and make the cherries the focal point of the recipe.
My favourite cherry recipes
Cherry clafoutis
White chocolate cherry cheesecake
There are lots of different ways that we can use cherries. And there are many complex flavours in really good ripe cherries that we can highlight. Cherries have a kind of musky flavour as well as a fruitiness with a sour edge. We can choose to either highlight the musky, almost tobacco nutty flavour or the berriness of cherries, the freshness that is similar to raspberries and strawberries.
We can also choose to use the shape of the cherries. They have a bright, deep, intense red colour. And so in the Cherry Bomb recipe I made the shape of the cherry the central part of the dish. This also allowed me to have a cute play on words with Cherry Bomb as the dish looks like a bomb.
Cherry Bomb
Cherry Clafoutis, a French classic made vegan and gluten free
In many of the dishes I paired cherries with nuts. Cherry goes very well with almonds. We can use either ground almond, whole almonds, flaked almonds or almond essence. It is very compatible with the cherry flavour. In fact, cherry stones can impart cherries with more of an almond flavour, if you bake the cherries whole with the stones in. This is a popular technique in one of the cherry recipes I created, Cherry Clafoutis. This recipe is often cooked with whole, unstoned cherries which are then removed during eating. But I am far too worried about forgetting and then chomping down on a harder-than-diamond cherry stone! So I moved away from tradition and created a clafoutis that is stoneless. This is one of the recipes that will be in our future French patisserie and baking course.
In the Cherry Bomb recipe, I removed the cherry stones very carefully and replaced them with a toasted hazelnut. These flavours go together really well but have a very different effect to almonds. Pairing hazelnut with cherry adds more of an earthiness. The hazelnuts should be toasted in the oven and skinned, this gives them a deeper, more intense flavour. They have their own musky-tobacco-earthy-woody flavour which is enhanced by toasting. This highlights those flavours in the cherries making the combination intense, reminiscent of dark Balkan forests. In the chocolate cherry ice cream recipe I once again used toasted hazelnuts but also smashed them to add texture to the ice cream. The nuts and fruit tempers the richness of the ice cream. The cherries also add little pops of bright red intense red colour.
Chocolate Ice Cream with Cherries and Hazelnuts
Banana Bread with Cherry Choc Swirl
In the banana bread recipe I decided against using fresh cherries as they can become pale, an insipid pink colour when baked in a banana bread. I decided to use cherry jam instead. This has been mixed with melted dark chocolate to create a swirl through the banana bread. This technique gives the recipe separate distinct flavours of the cherry with the chocolate and then the banana. So that when you're eating the banana bread you can taste those different flavours but they complement each other. It isn't just one homogenous flavour of banana, chocolate and cherry. This is one of the techniques I teach my students on The Vegan Chef Diploma. A more accomplished dish is one that takes the eater on a journey. They will take a bite and in that first instance they will be able to taste certain flavours and experience textures. As they chew the food that will change and evolve. There will be a journey as they're eating it, so it will be more interesting. We can employ this technique in more elevated dishes like the Cherry Bomb, or in more homely family favourite recipes like the Banana Bread.
White chocolate cherry cheesecake - recipe will be available in our upcoming Vegan French Patisserie and Baking course
Easy Cherry Pie