Buzz
Every summer, processing fruit can feel overwhelming. We start off with grand plans: the cherry trees are heavy with those juicy red fruits, and we imagine making cherry pies throughout the winter. We eye the apple tree, thinking this year will be the one for homemade apple cider. And it's always a mystery how many blackberries are needed for jam, because we inevitably leave the you-pick farm with way more than we anticipated.
What stands in the way of our sweet dreams of jams, pies, and cider is the laborious task of processing. Thankfully, there are tools designed to make it much simpler.
Pit cherries in no time with this cherry pitter
When I got serious about cherries, I knew I needed the perfect pitter. There are various options available, including handheld ones that pit a single cherry at a time and others that can load up to seven or eight cherries before clamping down. While those are effective, nothing has matched the dream cherry pitter: the Leifheit Cherry Pitter.
This model operates by continuously feeding cherries into a small hopper and then activating a lever, which sends the pit into a container below and the pitted cherry into a bowl intact. It worked flawlessly 99% of the time, whether the cherries were small or large. The real advantage is its speed: I processed about sixty pounds of cherries in just one hour. Picture the constant rhythm of “bam bam bam bam bam!” Even if you’re only pitting a few cherries, this tool is compact, user-friendly, and quick to clean, making it ideal for any task. It’s also easy to break down for dishwasher cleaning and storage.
I also pit olives once a year, and this pitter worked just as efficiently with them, preserving the flesh and rarely missing a pit, even with the olives’ firmer texture.
The three essential fruit tools I rely on are:
The unrivaled cherry-pitting champion: Leifheit Cherry Pitter
An apple peeler that also cores and slices for you
And a food mill to perfect your jams, smoothies, and sauces
With the right peeler/corer, processing apples can actually be enjoyable
Even the best peelers can make peeling apples or potatoes feel like a chore, leaving you at risk of cuts and boredom. You’ll end up standing by the sink for what feels like forever, soaking apples, coring, and slicing. But what if you could peel, core, and slice in under a minute with one tool? Enter: the apple peeler!
Simply clamp the peeler to your workspace, slide an apple onto the prong, and start cranking. The apple will be peeled in one smooth, satisfying ribbon of skin. At the same time, the tool makes a perfect spiral cut, and when you remove the apple, the core stays behind.
Not only does it save you time peeling, but it also gives you perfectly uniform slices for making stunning pies and tarts.
What’s even better is that this tool works on potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and—my favorite—daikon radish. For daikon, you can peel it and continue spiraling it, creating long ribbons perfect for salads.
A food mill means you’ll never have to worry about picking seeds out of your teeth again
No matter how thoroughly you blend or chop most small fruits, you’ll still end up with seeds in your final product. Tiny seeds from raspberries, strawberries, or tomatoes can ruin an otherwise perfectly smooth jam, smoothie, or sauce.
The best way to eliminate seeds (and any bits that didn’t blend fully) is with a food mill. These stainless steel gadgets work like a sieve or colander, but with a crank and blade that push the food through the holes. With continued turning, everything that passes through the mill becomes completely smooth, leaving only cores and seeds behind.
Food mills come with interchangeable screens of various sizes, allowing you to choose the right one for your ingredients. For example, use a larger screen for tomatoes and a smaller one for raspberries.
Cranking is easy, and you do it over a bowl to catch what’s processed. The food mill is simple to take apart, and all parts can either be washed by hand or placed in the dishwasher.
These tools are far from being one-dimensional: each one serves multiple purposes for different types of fruit, all while being affordable, made from durable materials, and easy to store when not in use.
