The Montmorency variety of the cherry family is extremely delicate. This is the reason you probably won't find fresh Montmorency tart cherries in the produce section of your local grocery store. The majority of the Montmorency tart cherries are used as an ingredient in recipes including cherry pies, cherry recipes, cherry powder and tart cherry juice concentrate. However, before learn about how to select tart cherry juice concentrate for your lifestyle, let's learn how the cherries are grown and harvested from blossom to bottle.
The cherry blossoms are a beautiful white and make a perfect backdrop for a family picnic. As the orchards fill with cherry blossoms, they are extremely beautiful and a relaxing place to enjoy a relaxing stroll. As you can see from the following photo the cherry orchards are an excellent contrast to the following countryside.
The cherry harvest occurs in mid July to early August.
As the cherries get ready for harvest a number of workers, farm equipment and "shakers" descend upon the orchards to gather all of the cherries.During the harvest, the main work horse equipment is the "shaker". Since the average tree produces over 7,000 cherries, the shaker replaces the need to handpick each cherry from the 2.6 million cherry trees.
The Cherry Shaker
The shaker grabs each tree and shakes the cherries free. As you can see in the photos below, the shaker also has a canopy to catch the fallen cherries. Once the cherries are shaken from the tree a conveyor belt carries the freshly harvested cherries to a tank of cool water.
Once the cherries are shaken from the trees they are then transferred to a processing station where the twigs, leaves and other debris are removed.
After the foreign objects are removed at the first set of processing stations they are moved to another area where the freshly picked tart cherries are sorted, pitted and sent for further down the line for processing. At the following stations in the processing cycle, the cherries are then washed repeatedly.
Once the tart cherries are sorted and pitted, many of them are then pressed to make cherry juice. The juice is then placed through a number of quality assurance and quality controls screens to ensure the juice is completely filtered of foreign objects. The cherry juice is then pasteurized and concentrated and placed into 52 gallon drums. To learn more tart cherry juice concentrate visit Traverse Bay Farms.
At this point the cherry juice concentrate is then bottled, frozen or packaged into 52 gallon drums for future use. Now you know exactly how tart cherry juice concentrate is made from the tree to the bottle.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Tart Cherry Juice Concentrate