Hi,
we raided my Mums backyard a week ago. And brought with us sour cherries and red currants. I made us some preserves from those fruit. We pitted the cherries and put them in the freezer bags and froze them. So we can use them in the winter time to make some cherry desserts. The cherries were very juicy and we collected that juice while we were pitting them. Also I had to let them sit in the sieve overnight in order to remove the excess juice before putting them in freezer. The 3 kg of cherries gave us 1.5 L of cherry juice. In it I put 150 g of citron acid and 1.4 kg (we opted for less sweet juice) sugar that I dissolved over 24 hours by mixing. This gave us approximately 3 L of cherry syrup. We bottled it up and now we’re using it to make cherry juice. This recipe does not require cooking and the juice is better kept in fridge during extremely hot weather. Otherwise it may start to ferment.

Recipe for sour cherry syrup

Cherry juice (strain the cherries after pitting)
100 g citron acid per 1 L of juice
1 kg sugar per 1 L of juice

Measure the amount of juice, citron acid and sugar you need. First add and dissolve citron acid, then start adding sugar. I like to add the sugar in batches of 200 g. Once a batch gets dissolved, add new batch in. After adding sugar mix it in until fully dissolved (should take around 24 hrs to do the entire amount of sugar). After you added approx. 1 kg of sugar per litre, start tasting the juice. Add a bit of syrup to a glass and add water to your liking. If it’s too sour, add more sugar. Stop adding sugar when you reach the desired sweetness. For us it was 1.4 kg sugar – slightly less then the recipe asks for, but we prefer the sour cherry juice to taste sour. Bottle the syrup (make sure to sterilize the bottles) and use it to make juice, in cocktails and deserts. If temperatures in your home reach 30 °C, or you notice it bubbling, put it in fridge.

Enjoy 😉