The Union Square market has been full of cherries the last couple of weeks, both the sweet and the sour kinds. Sweet cherries are great for eating but sour cherries are really great for two things: sour cherry jam and cherry pie. I made the jam two weeks ago and last week, for July 4th, was the pie’s turn.

The only problem  with using cherries to make anything is that you have to first pit them. There are all kinds of opinions out there on what is the easiest way to do that (using a paper clip seems to be really popular) but I’m here to tell you that the absolutely best tool for the job is the Progressive International GPC-5000 Cherry-It Multiple Cherry Pitter.

If you want to make anything using cherries, you have to get one of these. You place four cherries in each of the four holes (there are four large holes for sweet cherries and four smaller one for sour cherries), press the white top down and presto! You have four cherries pitted in less than a second. The pitter stays folded for storage and it’s dishwasher safe. With it, I was able to pit two and a half pounds of cherries in less than 20 minutes. Which is actually a lot longer than it took our July 4th guests to finish up their cherry pie slices.