Favorite Things: The Multi-Cherry Pitter

Aug 01, 2013, Updated Apr 13, 2024

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This is a cherry-pitting game-changer, my friends. Because generally speaking you aren’t pitting just a handful of cherries, in which case your greatest tool in the kitchen—your hands—works well to just tear the sweet cherry apart or pop out the tart cherry pit. Take that approach on quantity, and you best find a great window to look out, or a good friend to chat with, because pitting several pounds of cherries takes forEVER.

Enter the multi-cherry cherry pitter. What brilliance. I am not one for extraneous equipment in the kitchen, but this is worth the 6×3 inches or so it’s going to take up on a shelf somewhere and the less than $20 it takes to buy it. Which you can do here.

This thing takes down 4 cherries at once. It looks like it pits 8 cherries at once, which feels like a trick, but there are 4 spots that can be turned in the tray depending on the size of the cherry. That’s kind of…dumb…but that’s just me being greedy for the eight. The pitter uses pressure on metal posts to push the pits through the cherry and into a basin that collects them and most of the juicy spray (there isn’t much lost). The pit doesn’t always make a clean shot through and you have to pull it off the cherry, but it doesn’t slow you down much.

I pitted a quart of cherries in about 10 minutes. For those among us who have pitted cherries before, we know this is Olympian.

After all my bragging on Michigan this week, I would have thought this cherry genius would have come straight out of cherry country. But no, it comes out of Washington State, where I suppose they do have a few cherries too.

I’ll give them that, and thank them kindly for helping me get my gold medal in cherry pitting. I’m hoping the same, or at least a blue ribbon, for the beauty of a tart cherry recipe that is coming your way, finally!, tomorrow.