My dad planted a 5-in-1 cherry tree in our backyard 15 years ago. Back then, its slender trunk, with multiple skinny branches grafted on, stood level with my scrawny four-foot-tall, eight-year-old self. Now, every summer, friends and family congregate around the 30-foot-tall tree with ladders and bowls in hand. Except for this year. For reasons we have yet to understand, our tree has been mostly barren, only bearing a handful of tart fruit. My mum has been especially distressed since sweet, dark cherries are her favourite summer fruit.
The good news is that it’s just us. Ontario’s cherries—both sweet and sour—have been covering trees, filling baskets, lining produce aisles, and stuffing pies for the past few weeks. We’re right in the midst of the season, so you have a couple weeks of local cherry picking and eating to go.
While Ontario has multiple varieties of deep, sangria coloured sweet cherries that are perfectly plump to enjoy raw, the province’s principle tart cherry, the Montmorency, is better suited for cooking, unless you’re a fan of its mouth puckering, slightly bitter taste, like my dad (hence the 5-in-1 tree).
Because of their firmer nature, sour cherries hold up better when baked. And there’s no better place to savor sour cherry pie—Wanda Beaver’s favourite kind—than at her Kensington Market establishment: Wanda’s Pie in the Sky. She baked her first pie when she was nine years old using the sour cherries from her half-acre, fruit-filled backyard in Niagara. But, the artist-turned-baker never thought she’d be running her own restaurant until a friend asked her to supply baked goods to their café while they were students at OCAD University. Since then, she turned her passion into her profession and never looked back.
Although every type of the stone fruit contains the same nutrients, sweet cherries are a better source of potassium, while scarlet red sour cherries basically win in all other categories. They hold significantly more vitamin C and vitamin A, and have double the amount of melatonin—a hormone naturally secreted by our bodies that plays a crucial role in our sleep cycle—which means tart cherries can help you cope with jetlag, combat insomnia, or just sleep better. Sour cherries also boast a higher concentration of anthocyanin—an anti-inflammatory pigment responsible for its red to purple hues—that works to prevent and reduce muscle and joint pain. By drinking sour cherry juice or popping Montmorency pills, tart cherries can even be tools to tackling osteoarthritis and gout.
You’re welcome for the perfect excuse to eat Wanda’s sour cherry pie all season long.
