“The sour cherries are here again, aren’t they!” Rose Levy Beranbaum is practically giddy when I reach her by phone to talk about cherry pie. She’s written hundreds of pie recipes and at least a half-dozen cherry pie recipes, but the pie she comes back to most is one where sour cherries are baked under a flaky cream cheese lattice crust.
“Sweet cherries are easier to find, of course, but nothing compares to sour cherries in pie,” Beranbaum says. In her 1998 “The Pie and Pastry Bible,” which is in its 11th printing, she writes that “their tart flavor is as pure and joyful as the piercingly clear song of a cardinal.”
The only trouble with the crimson stone fruit, also called pie cherries or tart cherries, is that their season is fleeting. For only a few weeks each summer, fragile pints or quarts of bright red sour cherries can be found at markets in most cities in the continental United States — unless you live in or near Michigan or Wisconsin, where the majority of the country’s sour cherry varietals, including Early Richmond, English Morello and Montmorency, are grown. (New York, Pennsylvania, California, Washington, Utah and a few other states also produce sour cherries, but in much more limited quantities. For everyone else, and outside of their brisk season, there’s frozen or canned.)
Cherry trees thrive in places where winters are cold. The trees need that chill to induce dormancy, a frost-free spring to let the blossoms bloom and bees pollinate — though sour cherry trees are also self-pollinating. In late spring, the fruit ripens slowly, but hopefully before birds returning from the South have time to peck pockmarks into it.
Jolly Rancher red and mouth-puckeringly tart, the fruit is rarely eaten fresh out of hand. Sour cherries’ pale pink juices beg for sugar, which balances and enhances its singular flavor. Nowhere does that flavor shine brighter than in a pie.
For Beranbaum, sour cherry pie filling needs only the fruit, sugar, a pinch of salt and the tiniest hint of almond extract, which pulls the flavor out of the fruit in the most subtle, bewitching way.
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You could turn the cherries into a crisp or crumble, but for Beranbaum, a crunchy brown sugary topping isn’t nearly as good as a tender pie crust. Her pie dough recipe is enriched with cream cheese and cream, making it supremely tender and just a little bit tart.
A lattice crust encourages the cherries’ moisture to evaporate as they cook. Cornstarch in the filling won’t distract from the fruit’s flavor, and thickens its juices, but not so much that they won’t bubble up along the edges. Wait for big, thick bubbles that pop slowly; that’s how you know your pie is really done. If you need to cover the edges of the crust with aluminum foil so they don’t burn, do — it’s crucial that you let the filling boil until it thickens, or you’ll taste the starch.
Beranbaum suggests serving slices of sour cherry pie with a scoop of cheese cake or lemon curd ice cream — both recipes can be found in “Rose’s Ice Cream Bliss,” published last July, “though vanilla, America’s favorite, is always good, too, because it’s not too distracting. It lets the cherries be the star.”
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