We used to buy those contraptions where you could set them and a metal prong would knock out the cherry. We decided that it’s easier with a chopstick. We find the dot on the other side of the stem hole, poke it through there and voila! Easy!
John S
PDX OR
Good to know! Thank you for the tip! I’ve got a pitter and it is okay.
I plan on getting the Leifheit… i love whack a mole anyways.
It’s just that our pitter was expensive and slower than a chopstick.
John S
PDX OR
Another excuse to drink wine…yay.
If you dont have chipsticks …a straw will do.
I think one of those metal ones would be better though.
I still want a leifheit though.
Leifheit works well and quickly
Cherry stoner… no jokes please… That thing looks great! I wonder how much it costs? I think I want to get one too.
I have what looks like the Leifheit for sweet cherries. It works pretty well but the pit receptacle is too small and fills up too fast. Also it gets about 95% of the seeds so be alert for misfires.
For sours I just smoosh 'em all up and cook 'em for a bit and then pick out the stones when they have separated. I find that is faster that way. An even faster way is to push through a strainer but you lose some of the fiber that way.
I need to pick a bunch of cherries tomorrow morning, the crows decided they like cherries this year and they don’t seem to mind the bird scares. Each year it’s something new going on with the animals.
Good info. Out here the starlings are worse than the crows.
John S
PDX OR
Here it’s the robins.
I would be interested in knowing which cherry pitter you were running in the past. Friends eat a lot of sweet cherries and I bought an OXO cherry pitter for them as a gift and ordered one for my parents as well.
We had one like that. We can go through cherries pretty fast with our chopsticks, but not like that spring-activated Leifheit cherry “stoner”. We are going through thousands of cherries after biocharring the pie cherry trees. I guess expensive is in the eyes of the beholder. The chop sticks were free. I’m going to go on a new diet plan in which I only eat with chopsticks. I will get super skinny super fast. Frustrated though. The machine that we bought that looked like this also became off center and didn’t seem to work as well. We may have unfortunately bought an inferior brand.
John S
PDX OR
My sister tried that when she was in her later teenager years. Instead she got so skilled using only chopsticks with which to eat that she could finish her ice cream before it turned into a puddle! 
Love it , Scott! The animal part, that is. I actually laughed out loud. Thank you for that.
So I went ahead and bought a Leifheit. It does go really fast. It is a well designed machine. I’m starting to think that these Germans are getting pretty good at engineering! The main problem is that some of the cherries still have pits in them, so you have to check them. It’s still faster, but not as fast as I previously thought.
JohN S
PDX OR
We did a side by side comparison. I used the Leifheit and my wife used a chopstick. I got through way more cherries than she did. However, with the leifheit, you have to check, as often there is still a cherry in there afterwards. After checking, we found out that she could pit a whole cup more of cherries in about 7 minutes than I could because I had to go back and check. The company even tells you that some will still have a pit in them. We got 2 pits in our cherry-raspberry crisp for the first time today. Eat the dessert slowly. You don’t want to lose a tooth.
John S
PDX OR
We continue to eat the desserts slowly because we continue to find a pit in them from time to time, even after checking. We had zero pits when using the chopstick.
John S
PDX OR
A customer at farmers market last week insisted that the best cherry pitter was a bent paper clip. She added that she grew up in Michigan, so she had lots of experience pitting cherries. The narrower end does the work. Neither of us had a paper clip handy, so I didn’t get a demonstration.
What are the bird scares that you use?
I use reflective tape. Long pieces all around the tree to make what looks like a “fence” around the tree. Its not perfect but its 90% of the way to perfect.
