The Grilling Tool That Can Help You Pit Fresh Cherries

Fresh cherries are a delicious summer fruit, whether used in a variety of recipes or enjoyed as a snack on their own. However, when eating fresh cherries, one has to contend with the seeds. Sure, it can be fun to spit the pit out of a cherry when you're eating a few handfuls. But when you're making a cherry sauce, pie, salsa, topping, etc., or if you're feeding them to young kids, you'll need a different way to get the pit out. Instead of spending money on a cherry pitter, why not grab a household item you likely already have to pit your cherries with?

If you own a grill, chances are you've grilled a few kebabs and have a few (or a few hundred — they usually come in multi-packs) wooden skewers in your kitchen drawer. When you have some cherries that need pitting, grab one of these skewers and leave your pitting problems behind.

To pit your cherries using a wooden skewer, simply push the blunt end of the skewer through the stem end of the cherry until the pit pops out of the bottom. The pit will come out, but the cherry should stay intact, retaining all the sweet juice inside and keeping the mess to a minimum. It's still best to try this method over a bowl or sink while you get the hang of it in case any cherry juice does squirt out. It may seem slow at first, but you'll quickly become a cherry-pitting pro with some practice.

And if you're looking to contain the juicy mess when popping the pits out of your cherries, one TikToker in Australia used a combination of a wooden skewer and a glass bottle to get the job done. After placing the cherry on the mouth of the bottle, they use wooden skewers to push out the pit until it falls neatly into the bottom of the bottle. A little bit of the cherry flesh was compromised, possibly because they used two skewers instead of one, but all in all, this method for stabilizing the cherry and collecting the pits appears to work just fine.