Cocktail cherry

Surely many of us have seen brightly decorated cherry cocktails and often wondered what kind of berry it really was. If this is a regular cherry, in which case why is it not the usual red color, but yellow, green or blue? In fact, this is a real cherry, only processed using special technology. This does not mean that it cannot be eaten - it is completely edible, although the taste of cocktail cherry of all colors does not resemble fresh berry with its characteristic sour-sweet taste, but caramel.

Meanwhile, cocktail cherries are a special way of candied cherries that act as decorations for cocktails, ice cream, cakes and other sweet dishes. Cherry on a twig is especially popular among pastry chefs, although you can buy berries without it. Today, cocktail cherry is found on sale in cans ranging from 225 to 750 grams, mainly made of glass.

Interestingly, the culinary history of this interesting product begins in the late 19th century. Then the Americans pickled the Dalmac wild marasco cherry variety in a liqueur called Maraschino, and then used it as a cocktail decoration - hence the name. The cost of transporting such cherries was too expensive, so in the end they came up with another method of manufacture, which is still used today.

Most often, marasquin cherries are used to make cocktail cherries, which are first soaked for up to a month and a half in a solution of quicklime and sulfur dioxide, as a result of which the berries become denser and acquire an ivory color. After that, the cherries are removed from the seeds, bleached again with sodium chlorite and kept in water for a little more than a day - while discoloring agents are removed from the pulp. For even greater compaction, the cocktail cherry is kept for two weeks in sodium bisulfite solution.

And only at the most final stage of making this confectionery decoration, cherries are soaked in sugar syrup with the addition of a variety of food dyes. These are mainly natural substances, but recently more and more often in the composition of cocktail cherries you can find a lot of unpleasant additives with the letter E. known to each. It is clear that such a product does not carry practically any useful properties, with the exception of a purely aesthetic load.