Cherry Pitter - Heavy Duty Zinc Alloy Cherry Stoner [Ion-1B] Black

This Ionox Heavy Duty Zinc Alloy Cherry Stoner is simple in design, easy to use, no loose parts to confuse & loose, small, easy to store, and CHEAP!Besides being so useful for making cherry preserves or pie filling, this devise makes eating cherries so much more enjoyable. It takes 2-3 min to pit a pound of cherries. After that, you can sit and enjoy eating yummy cherries without being bothered by the pits. It's also much easier to add cherries to fruit salads now. I serve more cherries to company & enjoy them in more recipes now that it takes so little time to process them. To read my tips on using this cherry pitter, skip to the bottom.This is my cherry pitter story. Until the day I ordered this wonderful tool, I never thought about cherry pitters. I'm sure I knew they existed, I just never considered them. I adore cherries and they're only available for short time each year. They seemed particularly delicious this season and I've been gobbling them like mad. My local Sprouts had cherries on sale for a ridiculously low price. I like making & canning fruit compotes, preserves and such but have never canned cherries; probably because of the pits. When I saw how cheap the cherries were, I decided to can cherries and came home with 16 lbs worth! It was only after I got home and figured out compote & preserve recipes that I remembered I'd have to pit all 16 lbs of cherries.The idea of a cherry pitter came to mind. It was late & I've never seen a cherry pitter ever, much less anywhere locally. So I open up the handy Amazon app and searched. After 30 minutes of looking at various models and reading reviews, I decided on this Ionox Heavy Duty Zinc Alloy Cherry Stoner. It seemed to fit all my requirements (listed above) so I ordered it that night (Wednesday) and had it in my hands by Friday afternoon - just adore Amazon prime! This wonderful contraption is everything it espouses. It performs as promised, is such a time saver, is worth every penny & then some.I spent 15 minutes and a dozen+ cherries to figure out how to use it w/o crushing the fruit - skip to the end to read my tips. It took about 4 hrs to pit all 16 lbs of cherries. Yes that's a long time, but nothing compared to pitting with a paring knife. 16 lbs of cherries is roughly 1,280 cherries according to Google. With this Ionox Cherry Pitter, I processed 5-6 cherries per minute while watching cheesy movies - not bad by any stretch!So yes I adore this pitter. With its help, I canned 24 pints of delicious cherries that night - 12 pints of spicy cherry compote and 12 pints of cherry preserves - no refined sugar of course. Even with gifting cherries to friends, I have plenty to keep me happy until fresh cherries come around next year.TIP: Be sure to wash the cherries first and remove the stem. To pit cherries without crushing the fruit, position the cherry vertically in the cup. Imagine a line going through the stem end of the cherry through to the bottom. Place the cherry in the pitter cup bottom side down so that line runs "straight" from the stem end through the hole in the bottom of the pitter cup. Make sure that imaginary line doesn't bend or angle in anyway. When I tried tilting the stem end of the cherry to face the plunger (the thing opposite of the cup), I ended up squishing the fruit more often than not. Since I ate all the spoils, I didn't mind!. Just give it a few tries and you'll get the hang of it.TIP2: Don't over squeeze the handle. Squeeze the handle firmly, smoothly & quickly and release it quickly as soon as the pit is expunged. Squeezing the handle too hard and not releasing it soon enough will certainly crush the fruit. It only takes a little while to get the feel of using this pitter.TIP3: The cherries need to be fresh & ripe for the pitter to work properly. Cherries that are underripe don't release their stones easily. Overly ripe cherries tend to get squished. So please don't blame this device if the cherries are not properly ripe.Keep in mind, this Cherry pitter is not perfect, none of them are. Every once in a while a cherry will be crushed or the pit won't be removed. For what this cherry pitter costs, it works darned well.

Wow--- who knew I needed this product until cherry season came along this year and I found a super easy recipe for cherry crumble! And then I tried making it without a cherry pitter. Talk about a fiddly process. I comparison shopped this pitter agains others on Amazon and am so glad I bought it. It's comfortable in my hand, super easy to use and cleans up in a snap. And boy, does it do a job on cherry pits! I can get through 2 lbs of cherries in about 15 minutes. It keeps the cherry in one piece while popping the pits out of the bottom. So the crumble looks great. And the cherry-pitter comes with a cherry recipe book!By the way, if you want to try a great and super-easy crumble after you buy this cherry-pitting tool, here it is (the slivered almonds are the secret weapon):1 tablespoon granulated sugar
, 3/4 cup light brown sugar
, 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
, 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
, 1 stick cold unsalted butter cubed
, 3/4 cup slivered almonds
, 2 pounds ripe cherries (or peaches, nectarines, plums -- any stone fruit will do).Preheat the oven to 350°. Pit the cherries into a large bowl and sprinkle with the granulated sugar. In a large bowl, mix the brown sugar with the flour and salt. Add the butter and, using your fingers, work it into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Mix in the almonds. 
Spread the fruit in a 1 1/2-quart baking dish. Scatter the crumble on top. Bake 
for 35 to 40 minutes, until the fruit is bubbling and the topping is golden brown. Let cool for 15 minutes before serving. The crisp can be baked up to 6 hours in advance--- serve at room temperature or reheat slowly in a 300° oven. 
Recipe courtesy Julie Pointer Adams, Food & Wine Magazine

This is so much easier than cutting cherries apart with a knife!I have used it so far with big bing cherries, and was pleased that bigger cherries work well in it. To pit a cherry, take the stem off, put the bottom of the cherry in the cup, and press the pokey part down into the cherry. The pit will pop out the other side. Sometimes, the pit isn't lined up completely correctly, and the cherry needs to be wiggled around a bit before the pit falls out, but it doesn't take too long, even when this needs to be done.Almost all of the time, the part of the cherry that the pit pushes through stays attached to the cherry, and just the pit falls out, so there's very little waste.The pitter feels very sturdy and durable, and is quite heavy for its size. One warning -- it does make cherry juice. My cutting board looked like something out of Dexter by the time I was done with a bowl of cherries!

I’m not super pleased with this purchase, but it gets the job done. My biggest complaint is that if you have a large quantity of cherries tompit, it starts to hurt the fleshy part between your thumb and finger. It smashes the cherries a litte bit, so if you’re using any for decoration, try to find smaller sized cherries so they don’t get split by this pitter. My last complaint is that about 30% of the time, the pits got stuck in the hole. What’s so great about it is the price tag. Even with those little imperfections, it’s still very cheap compared to others. It feels pretty sturdy too. I pitted about 13 lbs of cherries and pitted the last cherry just as smoothly as the first. It’s pretty small too and can fit well in any drawer. Even buried in my junk I am still able to find it easily because of the beautiful red! I like the latch at the end of the handles as well. It keeps it compact and tidy. With a slightly more comfortable grip, and a longer pitting-punchy-thing to prevent from smashing the cherries, this would easily be a 5 star.