I've never really cared for cherry sauce.
On the other hand, I love 'risalamande' so much that I have always eaten it for breakfast on the 25th of December. The cherry sauce, however, has always been a different matter - I never really liked it. Too weird of a cherry taste and too sweet (even for me who loves all things sweet).
But as a food entrepreneur, I develop products that I like myself. So I became curious as to whether I could develop a really good cherry sauce.
I had to think outside the box, and here I started with fresh cherries. Because I love fresh cherries. So the question was: What happens in the process from the fresh berry to sauce that makes me not like the sauce?
New production method
I came to the conclusion that the cherry flavor should be the focus. Because now that I love the taste of fresh cherries, it's not the cherry taste itself that I don't like. But more so what it becomes when it is processed into a sauce.
Therefore, my focus became to get a handle on the two, in my opinion, most important ingredients; cherry and vanilla. I found that most other cherry sauces are produced with water as the first ingredient. And as with everything else with flavor, you want to pack maximum flavor into any sauce. Eg. you would never make a regular sauce with water as the first ingredient. So here I would start with something that tastes like cherries.
Therefore, the base of my cherry sauce is cherry juice. So we already start there with maximum cherry flavor. Many others will add cherries to their water, thus cooking the taste of cherries into the water. It's cheap and easy. The juice is expensive, but worth it! And then I add the carriers at the end of the process, because that way they are allowed to retain all their flavor. It gives, I think, some much better cherries in the sauce too.
Few ingredients require extra high quality
When there are so few ingredients, it's really important that it's good quality. So that's why I use Danish cherries and Danish cherry juice.
The vanilla I use is from Mette Ravn Vanilje. Mette Ravn is probably the person in Northern Europe who knows the most about vanilla. She delivers a super high quality, and that's exactly how it should be. The vanilla we use in the cherry sauce itself is a Noire Fendue Vanilla from Madagascar. It is a fully ripe vanilla, where the vanilla has been left to hang for a longer time on the stem, so that it opens at the end. This gives the vanilla a more developed taste, which goes really well with a cherry sauce.
Sweet on sweet and sweeter
Another thing is that all the cherry sauce I've tasted is very sweet. And sweet (cherry sauce) on sweet (risalamande) with more sweet (dessert wine) is not a good combination. I have a massive sweet tooth, but when you've just eaten browned potatoes (i.e. potatoes with caramel that we eat for Christmas) and a normally quite sweet Christmas sauce, you need something a little sour to balance it all out.
I therefore think that a good cherry sauce should also be slightly sour. Not so that you squint, but just so that you get a little tickle on your tongue. Sweet and sour. It is perfectly suited to risalamande.
Organic will not do here
My cherry sauce cannot be organic, unfortunately. There are two reasons; partly I have had problems with the production when we have tested. The cherries behave wildly differently from time to time, and we cannot get a high enough quality. And partly, the organic berries I want to use are very small. So when we stone them, they become very small. And that gives you squishy and boring berries in the sauce itself. It does not work. So instead we get Danish berries and Danish juice of super quality.
These were the reasons why my cherry sauce is absolutely amazing. So I hope you want to try it!
But if for some reason you don't want my cherry sauce on the Christmas table, you'll get a good trick for choosing a good cherry sauce.
A good trick for choosing your cherry sauce
A good trick for choosing a good cherry sauce, if you don't have the opportunity to taste it, is to look at the ingredient list. If water is first, then it is not a good sign. After all, all the ingredients are listed in order of what is the most. So if water comes first, you buy water first and foremost, and that goes beyond the cherry taste. By comparison, my cherry sauce contains 78% cherries.