![]() After she's finished, she shoots out of her chair and throws her hand up in a positively Olympian gesture. Then, as soon as "Go!" is shouted, she starts eating that pie as if her life depended on it. One blonde sporting a high ponytail, low-rise jeans, and shimmery blue eye shadow takes a seat at the table. I'm almost hoarse from cheering by the time the 16-year-olds are up. The intensity increases as the heats progress. Contestants take part in heats, grouped by age. ![]() "The biggest rule of all is to chew and swallow," she tells everyone. Known around here as "the Cherry Pie Lady," she has lots of tips for the entrants, who are as young as two and as old as 45 or thereabouts. "Walk, do not run, and come on and eat cherry pie!" yells Nancy Grimm, who has been managing the event since the late '80s. Some 20 hours later, I show up as advised. Sweet cherries for the fresh market are generally harvested by hand, but in Michigan more than 90 percent of the sweets grown are sold to processors those too are mostly harvested by mechanical means. The harvesting of sours is perhaps the easiest part of raising the fruit it is usually done by a long-armed machine that grabs the base of each tree and shakes it until the ripe fruit falls onto a "catching frame" (which resembles a tarp shaped like an upside-down umbrella) spread on the ground or, sometimes, attached directly to a tree. Diligent pruning is also a must: Cherry leaves are plentiful and can block sunlight in a way that prevents the fruit from ripening. (By comparison, an apple tree takes three years the life span of most apple trees is similar to the cherry's.) Then there are the diseases particular to cherry trees, which are difficult to control, like cherry leaf spot, in which a fungus infecting a single leaf may inhibit the ripening of an entire tree. First, Nugent explains, it's expensive, and it requires a major commitment: a cherry tree, whose average life span is 30 years, takes about seven years to bear fruit. During my trip, I stopped by his office to learn more about commercial cherry farming, which can apparently be a trying endeavor in many ways. ![]() Jim Nugent, a scientist at Northwestern Michigan Horticultural Research Station, in Traverse City, is an expert on the matter. The joy of eating cherries derives, of course, from the serious business of growing them. Sweet cherries may also be cooked, but given their more straightforward, even sugary, flavor, most people prefer to eat them in their natural state. Their acidity lends a complex, nuanced flavor to baked goods, and they are more delicate than sweet cherries but hold their shape better when heated. ![]() Indeed, most Traverse City locals refer to sour cherries as "tarts" they are best suited for cooking. Culinary authority Waverley Root, in his encyclopedic work_ Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World _(Smithmark Publishing, 1996), suggested that sour cherries were somewhat misnamed: " the word means in this case is really acid," he wrote. ![]() When it comes to taste, however, the difference can be subtle although clear-cut examples of each genre exist, some sour cherry varieties have juice tinged with sweetness, and vice versa. When it comes to shape and color, it's easy to differentiate between the two main types of cherry: sours tend to be heart shaped and an orange-kissed red, while sweets are often globular and dark, in the burgundy-black range. ![]()
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