Cooking with Campiche: Yummy Bing cherry sauce

Published 10:38 pm Wednesday, July 23, 2025

My wife, Laurie, drove back from Yakima, Wash., with a box-full of fresh Bing cherries, and after two days of stuffing ourselves with the beautiful fruit, she fell into “preservation mode.”

This sauce is just sublime over yogurt or ice cream. She even tried it over chocolate waffles. Superb!

To quote William Carlos Williams with one deviation: “I have eaten the plums (cherries) that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold.”

Ingredients

2 lbs. Bing cherries, washed stemmed and pitted

1/4 cup granulated sugar

3 tablespoons Kirshwasser

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Juice of half a lemon (about 2 1/2 tablespoons)

1 tablespoon cornstarch

2 tablespoons water

Preparation

1. Bring cherries, sugar, Kirshwasser, almond extract and lemon juice to a simmer over a medium heat.

2. Turn heat down and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to redistribute cherries.

3. In a separate small bowl, dissolve cornstarch in two tablespoons of water and stir to remove lumps. Spoon a little of the juice from the cooking cherries into the cornstarch/water mixture and stir to combine. Then slowly add to the cherries and stir to incorporate.

4. Cook an additional three minutes to thicken.

This is excellent as a sauce on ice cream, vanilla yogurt, pancakes or waffles.

David Campiche is a potter, poet, writer and lifelong resident of the Long Beach Peninsula.