It’s cherry season, and I love cherries, so here’s a simple smoothie that highlights their great flavor. Cherries can go well with many combinations, but in this recipe I didn’t want to dilute their flavor. I just used cherries, almonds, and vanilla extract. You could make this with frozen cherries, which would save you the work of pitting them, but I used fresh cherries. I have an old cherry pitter that looks like this one that makes pitting easy. I also used peeled almonds to make it smoother.
1/2 cup water
1.5 cups pitted cherries
1/2 cup peeled almonds*
1 tsp vanilla extract
10 ice cubes
Yields ~2.5 cups of delicious cherry smoothie.
Blend on high until smooth (~60 seconds) and enjoy. I blended for a little extra time to get the almonds extra smooth. The power of a Vitamix or Blendtec is essential to get the almonds to a smooth consistency.
Depending on your taste and your cherries you may want to add a little sweetener, but for me cherries are usually plenty sweet.
I’ve been meaning to try vanilla pods, but I haven’t yet. They sound exciting, though less convenient than the extract.
Cherry season always ends too soon, so don’t delay! I found this handy chart that shows we are entering the peak of California cherry season, and there’s about a month to go. Luckily the season doesn’t end there; cherries from the Northwest are available through August. Of course you can always use frozen cherries, but I haven’t seen them at Trader Joe’s lately.
*To peel almonds I soak them overnight, and then pinch them out of their peel. Alternatively you could buy blanched and peeled almonds, or you could use almond milk and/or almond butter. Using almonds with skins would also work, but this is a more delicate recipe, so it’s nice to have the slightly smoother result.
Hi, just want to leave a feedback here to say how YUMMY this smoothie is. I would have never thought of this recipe myself. A few notes: 1) I didn’t peel the almond skin but I did as you suggested, blend the almond with water first before adding the rest and it comes out perfect with a Vitamix. 2) I went on youtube to learn the best way to pit the cherries. I invented the “cutting a small slit on top then smashing” method to be fastest for my purpose (since I don’t care about the aesthetic of the cherries and it retain more juice by cutting a slit first). Happy blending! CH
Just made this with variations of what I had on hand. Used coconut water that actually had pieces of meat in it, cherries and hazelnuts. Also used 1/2 vanilla bean pod. Tastes good.
I had to use frozen dark cherries when trying this last night. My Blendtec had troubles grinding this one out as directed, so I added a tad more water and then a little almond milk because it was was still too thick. In the end, the concoction was utterly gross to my pallet, so it got tossed. YMMV
If you sub in frozen cherries you should modify the recipe to use water instead of ice — otherwise it will be more sorbet than smoothie (and sorbet is trickier to blend — usually you need to make more at once). It’s hard for me to imagine what could go wrong with the flavors, unless you just don’t like cherries, almonds, or vanilla. I suppose if you added too much vanilla (or used an ultra-concentrate), that could make it a bit unpalatable. If I were to make something and the vanilla flavor was too strong I would add some more ingredients to dilute the vanilla flavor. Or you could add sweetener if you have a sweet tooth.