Recipe: Fermented wild black cherry cordial (Prunus serotina)

Find out how to turn wild black cherries (Prunus serotina) into fermented wild black cherry cordial – a delicious, fizzy, probiotic health tonic! 

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We love homemade fermented foods and view them as one of the keys to good health, as we’ve written about here and here. We also enjoy fermented beverages, something we started experimenting with years ago when making water kefir, milk kefir, kombucha, and tepache (from the skins of our homegrown pineapples).

At the end of the day, we enjoy watching the sunset with our ducks while enjoying a cold homemade beverage (or warm beverage during the cold months). Each night is different, depending on what’s ripe in our yard or what we’ve recently foraged.

Some recent favorites: muddled fresh raspberries and makrut lime leaves, sparkling elderflower syrup, dwarf tamarillo and calamondin oranges.

As a general rule, we either use whole fruit, skin and all, or we use the whole fruit to make a fermented beverage. Option 1, using whole fruits/berries, is largely a prebiotic, providing lots of good fiber to feed our resident gut microbes). Option 2, fermented beverages, is primarily a probiotic, introducing diverse species of beneficial microbes to our gut flora.

Our philosophy is that medicine should be delicious since we eat and drink it regularly each day.

Our nightly beverage tradition has caused us to look at various plants in a unique light. For instance, instead of seeing mimosa trees (Albizia julibrissin) purely as invasive trash trees, we now also see them in a more eastern sense.

In China, they’re called the “tree of happiness,” since the flowers and bark are used to treat depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems. It just so happens that mimosa flowers also make an absolutely delicious fermented beverage as well, that tastes almost exactly like the flowers smell.

 

A post shared by Tyrant Farms (@tyrantfarms) on Jun 10, 2017 at 2:37pm PDT

Native black cherry trees: trash or treasure?

Similarly, our native black cherry trees (Prunus serotina) seem to be held in little regard outside of being prized by furniture and cabinetmakers for its gorgeous wood. Farmers hate the trees since compounds in their leaves can kill or sicken their livestock when eaten.

And nobody seems to care much for the tiny bittersweet wild cherries that the tree produces, other than some old timers who make them into jellies, pies, and sauces. However, we’ve absolutely fallen in love with black cherry trees ever since we experimented with the fruit for the first time.

Recently, while out foraging for chanterelle mushrooms, we walked out of the woods into a clearing to find a patch of black cherry trees with low-hanging branches completely covered with ripe fruit. Needless to say, we quickly found room in our harvest basket for both mushrooms and wild cherries.

A week later, and we’d turned them into a test batch of fermented (sparkling) black cherry cordial ready to taste. We LOVED it, as did our guests.

Wild black cherry cordial is similar to the taste of domesticated cherries, but intensified by many orders of magnitude, likely due to higher concentrations of the wild cherries’ unique antioxidant compounds. The fermentation process adds bubbles to the drink that serve to further enhance the flavor while adding a visceral dynamism to each sip.

A few days later, we went back to the same spot to pick more wild black cherries to make a bigger batch of fermented wild black cherry cordial, using the recipe we share below.

How to make Fermented Wild Black Cherry Cordial

Some helpful process photos

We share our exact fermented wild black cherry recipe at the bottom of this article, but we also wanted to add some process photos to help you more easily make this recipe:

1. Smashing the cherry fruit open. 

2. Cover with breathable cloth, and let the fermentation begin! 

3. Stirring and tasting until your wild black cherry cordial is “done.”

Can you make other fruit cordials the same way?

We’ve got wonderful new for you: you can use this basics from this wild black cherry cordial recipe to make delicious ferments from basically any fresh, seasonal fruit you pick! The same basics also apply to fermented flower cordials (wisteria, elderflowers, etc). 

Modify ingredient ratios according to your tastes and the inherent sweetness/sugar content of the fruit you’re using. For instance, strawberries are much sweeter than wild black cherries, so we’d bump down the sugar and bump up the acid/lemon juice.

Recommended items for making wild black cherry cordial (and similar fermented beverages)

Here are a few things we mention in the recipe that we highly recommend you get if you plan to regularly make fermented beverages:

• Anchor Hocking Heritage Hill Glass Jar (2 gallon or 1 gallon) – *we don’t recommend putting acidic foods or making ferments in plastic containers even if they’re labeled BPA-free
• Reusable, flip-top brew bottles that allow you to easily release the pressure building in your stored jars caused by the CO2. Warning: if you get into fermented beverages, the “pop” sound of one of these bottles being opened will trigger a Pavlovian response and you’ll start drooling each time you hear it.
• Organic raw cane sugar – contains more flavor and micronutrients than highly refined sugar and it’s grown in a way that isn’t absolutely horrid for the environment and farm workers. (Read here and here for reference.)
• High quality citric acid

Recipe: Fermented wild black cherry cordial (from Prunus serotina)

In case you’re wondering, this recipe produces a very lightly alcoholic beverage on par with kombucha, maybe 2-3% ABV. If you want a more alcoholic beverage, you can use the cordial as a base for a mixed drink.

Let us know how your first (or next) batch of fermented wild black cherry cordial turns out!

KIGI,

Get a taste of other articles you’ll love:

• Golden raspberry, elderflower, and honey fermented cordial
• Native passionfruit (Passiflora incarnata) & Meyer lemon sparkling cordial 
• Fermented wild black cherry (Prunus serotina) cordial
• Sparkling fermented lemonade with honey
• Honey-fermented kumquats 
• Easiest turmeric and ginger bug recipe
• Wisteria, mimosa, and other wild flower cordials
• Chickweed wine recipe
• Tony & Andrea’s pumpkin “champagne” recipe
• Fermented chicha morada – purple corn beer