Name: Golden Cherry-Cheese Varenikes
Yield: Yield: 35 to 40 Varenikes
Cuisine: United States
Ingredients: Egg wash (1 or 2 large eggs, as needed, each beaten with 1 teaspoon water); Crystallized ginger, cut into bits (1 to 2 tablespoons); About 1 pound sour red cherries, stemmed and pitted (about 2 cups; if you don’t have a cherry pitter, a hairpin works well), or if fresh are not available, 2 cups canned sour cherries packed in water, drained; sour cream, yogurt cream, labneh, or Honeyed Cream; 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus additional for greasing the pan; ground cinnamon; ½ teaspoon almond extract; 4 ounces cream cheese (½ cup), softened; Sugar, as needed (if you have vanilla sugar, by all means, substitute it—it is lovely here); 35 to 40 wonton wrappers, plus extra in case of tearing

Preparation info

Yield:
35 to 40
Varenikes

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Jewish Holiday Cooking

By Jayne Cohen

Published 2008

About

The ripest sour cherry popped into the mouth raw—even when deeply sugared—cannot compete with the sweet kind, dribbiing dark juices down the chin, delirious as summer. Just finding a sour cherry requires real detective work. So why bother? Because when they are cooked, sour cherries are unsurpassed. It’s then that their fresh, tart-acid taste leaves their sweet cousins in the dust, fleshy and flat in comparison.

Eastern European Jews relished the bright tang of sour cherries