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Every year about this time my neighbor comes by with a bag of fresh Bing cherries from her tree and a plea to come pick more before the birds get them.
That’s the thing about cherry season, the trees seem to ripen all at once and for a week or two you have bucketloads!
If you have an abundance of fresh cherries (or frozen cherries), one fun and easy thing to make with them is cherry frozen yogurt.
What I love about the frozen yogurt is that the yogurt is naturally tart. Bing cherries are sweet and they need something tart to intensify their flavor (which is why you typically use sour cherries for cherry pie).
Also frozen yogurt is a lot easier to make than custard-based ice creams, but can still be quite creamy and smooth.
This frozen yogurt will last several days in the freezer without getting too hard (which happens often with homemade ice creams).
Cherry Frozen Yogurt Recipe
A cherry pitter
Ingredients
- 3 cups pitted fresh or frozen cherries
- 2 Tbsp lemon juice
- 3/4 cup sugar (more or less depending on how sweet the cherries and how sweet you want your frozen yogurt to be)
- 1/4 cup whole milk (can substitute half-and-half or cream for creamier version)
- 1 1/2 cups full fat yogurt (if you are using non or low-fat yogurt, add 2 Tbsp heavy cream)
- 2 Tbsp almond liqueuer such as Amaretto (optional)
Special equipment:
Method
1 Cook the cherries with lemon juice and sugar: Place the pitted cherries, lemon juice, and sugar in a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved.
While the mixture is heating, use a potato masher to mash up the berries in the pot which will release some of their moisture.
When all of the sugar has dissolved, remove from heat and let cool for 10 minutes.
2 Place the cherry mixture in a blender and pulse until smooth.
3 Make and chill yogurt base: Mix cherry purée, milk, and yogurt together in a bowl. Chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour; the longer the mixture chills the better (can chill overnight).
4 Process in ice cream maker: Right before processing in an ice cream maker, add the almond liqueur if using. The alcohol in the liqueur will help keep the frozen yogurt smooth, but it is not necessary.
Process the mixture in your ice cream maker for 25 minutes.
You can eat it right away (it will be rather soft) or put it in the freezer for a few hours to harden up a bit.
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Elise Bauer is the founder of Simply Recipes. Elise launched Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to keep track of her family's recipes, and along the way grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. Elise is dedicated to helping home cooks be successful in the kitchen. Elise is a graduate of Stanford University, and lives in Sacramento, California.
Cherry Frozen Yogurt
Can you use grocery store canned grocery?
Hi, Lynda — I wouldn’t try it with canned cherries, as I think it would be too sweet and syrup in canned cherries might impact the outcome of the ice cream. Frozen works as a great short cut and saves you from pitting them.
I think this was the best thing I have ever eaten in my whole life. I was trying to lick all the mixture off all the parts that touched it. Now I have to wait a few more weeks until my cherry trees get ripe to do it again.
xxxxxyyyyy
Just made this this afternoon and it was wonderful for dessert tonight. The kids loved it and I don’t think I’ve had such creamy homemade ice cream/frozen yogurt before. So good, thanks for the recipe. (I only had non-fat yogurt in the house, but also heavy cream so I just replaced the milk with the heavy cream.) Have you tried a similar recipe with other fresh fruit? I’m tempted to try a few.
Blueberry frozen yogurt (http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/blueberry_frozen_yogurt/) and strawberry frozen yogurt (http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/strawberry_frozen_yogurt/) are great too!
Very delicious!
xxxxxyyyyy
We made this recipe today but aren’t sure what kind of cherries we were using…cherries don’t grow here, so we bought whatever variety the grocery store sold us. :D
The consistency of the frozen yogurt turned out perfectly, but it was very very sweet. Can we lessen the amount of sugar added, or will that change the properties of the end product?
I haven’t tried it with less sugar, but I’m guessing that it will turn out fine. ~Elise