Sweet Cherry Almond Pie: Fixing Flat-Tasting Sweet Cherries

The first sweet cherry pie I ever made looked gorgeous and tasted like nothing. The color was right, the filling was set, and the flavor was a vague, sugary red that could have been any fruit. I assumed I had bought bad cherries. I had not. I had bought perfectly good sweet cherries and baked them the way you would bake tart ones.

Sweet cherries (Bing, Lapins, Rainier) are low in acid, and acid is a big part of what we taste as “cherry” once the fruit is hot and cooked down. Without it, the filling goes flat and candy-like. After a lot of side-by-side pies, I settled on two small fixes: fresh lemon juice for brightness, and a measured amount of almond extract to bring back the marzipan note that sits right next to cherry flavor.

This recipe builds the whole pie around those two fixes, and it covers frozen cherries too, because they release a surprising amount of liquid and you have to plan for it.

Ingredients

About 2 pounds (roughly 6 cups) of pitted sweet cherries fills a 9-inch pan. Weigh them after pitting if you can.

For the Crust

• 2 1/2 cups (315 g) all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling
• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon fine salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
• 6 to 8 tablespoons ice water
• 1 egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon milk, for the wash
• 1 tablespoon coarse sugar, for sprinkling

For the Filling

• 2 pounds fresh or frozen sweet cherries, pitted (about 6 cups)
• 1/2 cup (100 g) granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup (30 g) cornstarch
• 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (about 1 large lemon), plus 1 teaspoon zest
• 1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract
• 1/4 teaspoon fine salt
• 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
• 1/4 cup sliced almonds, for the top

How to Make It

Prep: 45 minutes  |  Bake: 60 minutes  |  Cool or chill: 4 hours  |  Serves: 8 slices

1. Make the crust. Whisk the flour, sugar and salt together. Work in the butter with your fingertips or a pastry cutter until you have pieces ranging from pea-sized to flat, almond-sized flakes. Sprinkle in 6 tablespoons of ice water and toss with a fork, adding more a tablespoon at a time until the dough just holds together when squeezed.
2. Divide the dough into two disks, one slightly larger than the other, wrap, and chill for at least 1 hour (up to 2 days). The cold is what keeps the butter in flakes, and flakes are what keep the bottom from turning to paste.
3. Prepare the cherries. If using fresh, pit them and halve any very large ones. If using frozen, do not thaw them on the counter. Tip them into a colander over a bowl, let them stand for 20 minutes, and save every drop of the liquid that collects.
4. If you are using frozen cherries, pour the collected juice into a small saucepan and simmer over medium heat until it reduces to about 1/4 cup, 6 to 8 minutes. It should look syrupy. Cool it for 5 minutes, then pour it back over the cherries. For fresh cherries, skip this step.
5. Toss the cherries with the sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice, zest, almond extract and salt. Let the bowl sit for 15 minutes. The sugar will pull out some juice and the cornstarch will begin to hydrate, which means you see the real amount of liquid before it goes in the pie.
6. Position a rack in the lower third of the oven, put a rimmed baking sheet on it, and heat the oven to 425°F. Roll the larger disk into a 13-inch round on a floured surface and fit it into a 9-inch pie plate, leaving the overhang. Roll the second disk to about 12 inches for the top.
7. Pour the filling into the bottom crust, scraping in all the juices, and dot with the cold butter pieces. Lay the top crust over, trim the edges to about 1 inch, fold the overhang under, and crimp. Cut 5 or 6 vents in the top. Brush with the egg wash, sprinkle with the coarse sugar, and scatter the sliced almonds over the top.
8. Set the pie on the hot baking sheet and bake at 425°F for 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375°F and bake for 40 to 45 minutes more, until the crust is deep golden and the filling bubbles thickly through the vents, not just at the edges. The bubbles should look slow and glossy, which tells you the cornstarch has fully activated.
9. If the edges brown too fast, tent them loosely with foil for the last 20 minutes.
10. Cool the pie on a wire rack for at least 4 hours before slicing. This is not optional. The filling finishes setting as it cools, and a warm slice will run across the plate.

Can You Make This Pie Ahead?

Once the cherries meet sugar and lemon juice they start releasing liquid. A fully assembled, unbaked pie left in the refrigerator overnight will have a wet, gray-looking bottom crust before it ever sees the oven. If you want to work ahead, roll and fit the bottom crust in the pan and chill it, and keep the top crust rolled on a sheet of parchment. Do the cherries the day of.

A baked pie is another story. It keeps well loosely covered at room temperature for the first day, then in the refrigerator for up to 3 more days. Reheat slices or the whole pie at 325°F for 15 to 20 minutes to bring the crust back. Freezing the baked pie works for up to 2 months, though the crust is never quite as crisp afterward.

Why Sweet Cherries Taste Flat in a Pie

Raw sweet cherries taste wonderful because your mouth gets sugar, a little acid and a lot of aroma at once. Baking changes that balance. The aroma compounds cook off, the sugar concentrates, and the small amount of acid that was there gets diluted by all the juice the fruit releases. What is left is sweet and red and not much else.

Tart cherries, the Montmorency kind, avoid this because they start with enough acid to survive the oven. That is why traditional cherry pie recipes work fine with them and fall apart when someone substitutes Bings from the grocery store. If you have ever followed a classic cherry pie recipe with sweet fruit and been disappointed, this is the reason, and it is not your fault.

The fix is not more sugar. Sweet cherries are already sweet enough. What they need is the thing they lack, which is acid, and a nudge toward the aroma that cooking drives off.

Lemon Juice and Almond Extract: How Much, and Why

Three tablespoons of lemon juice sounds like a lot for a filling that already has half a cup of sugar. In practice it is the amount where the pie tastes noticeably more like cherry without tasting lemony. I tried 1 tablespoon, 2 and 3 in three otherwise identical pies. At 1 tablespoon the filling was still dull. At 3 it was bright, and nobody I fed it to mentioned lemon. The zest adds a bit of floral oil that the juice lacks, so I keep it.

Almond extract does a different job. The pit of a cherry contains benzaldehyde, the compound that dominates almond extract, and it is part of why cherries and almonds taste so natural together. A half teaspoon in this filling nudges the flavor toward something that reads as more cherry, while a full teaspoon makes it taste like almond. Use pure almond extract if you can find it. The imitation kind has a harsher, medicinal edge that comes through when it is baked.

The sliced almonds on top are mostly for texture and for the toasted smell as the pie bakes. They are optional, but they do tell people what to expect before the first bite.

Fresh vs. Frozen Cherries, and Handling the Liquid

Fresh sweet cherries are only available for a few weeks, and pitting two pounds of them is a chore. Frozen pitted cherries are a perfectly good substitute, and in the middle of winter they are often better than the sad fresh ones in the produce aisle. They were usually frozen at peak ripeness, and the pitting is done for you.

The catch is liquid. Freezing breaks down the fruit’s cell walls, so frozen cherries release much more juice than fresh ones as they thaw and bake. If you toss them straight from the bag with cornstarch and pour them into the crust, you will usually get a filling that is soupy at the center and a bottom crust that never crisps. Thawing them in a colander and reducing the juice, as in the recipe, solves this. You keep all the flavor and lose the excess water.

Do not throw out the thawed juice. It is the most concentrated cherry flavor in the bowl. Reduced to a few tablespoons, it makes the filling taste more intensely of cherry than the fresh version does, which is a small irony of working with frozen fruit.

For fresh cherries, the extra step is not needed, but the 15-minute rest after tossing still matters. It tells you how juicy your particular batch is. If a lot of liquid has pooled at the bottom of the bowl, add another teaspoon of cornstarch.

Questions People Ask

Can I use tart cherries in this recipe?

You can, but you should change it. Tart cherries already have the acid, so cut the lemon juice to 1 tablespoon (keep the zest), raise the sugar to about 3/4 cup, and keep the almond extract. Without those changes the pie will be sharper than you expect.

Do I need to thaw frozen cherries before baking?

Yes, partially. Let them drain in a colander for about 20 minutes and reduce the collected juice before mixing it back in. Baking them solid from the freezer pushes all that water into the crust.

Why did my cherry filling turn out runny?

Usually it is one of three things: frozen fruit with unreduced juice, a pie cut before it cooled for 4 hours, or filling that never bubbled thickly in the center. Cornstarch needs to reach a full boil to thicken, so look for slow, glossy bubbles coming up through the vents.

Can I leave out the almond extract?

Yes. The pie will still be good with the lemon alone, just a little less perfumed. If you want a gentler version of the flavor, replace it with a tablespoon of amaretto.