Norpro Deluxe Cherry Pitter with Clamp

It works just like the video: fast, simple, doesn't spatter, easy on your arm. Within minutes, I was up to the speed of the demonstration. It can even handle pitting with stems on with just a little technique. It's a minimalistic design. Everything that needs to work is perfect, no extraineous features.

People become engineers I think so they can invent things like this. It requires no power, no batteries or cord, and yet it works beautifully. The design appears not to have changed at all from the orange 70's model I originally bought from the garage sale, which is in fine working order, just a bit rusted from having been left in the dish water too long. It has the little tab of flexible silicone rubber that needs to be in place, and the transparent plastic cup, and the plunger, and that is all the parts there are. Deceptively simple, the cherries tend to roll (or may have to be pushed with a finger sometimes, depending on the size of the cherries, and the stickiness, cherries covered with juice are sticky, to the spot where the plunger comes down, slices through the cherry, pushes the pit (but not the cherry) through the hole in the silicone rubber tab, and as the plunger comes back up it lifts the cherry slightly, but the hole the plunger retreats through shoves the cherry off the plunger, and it falls into a little channel, and rolls neatly down the chute into whatever dish you have ready for it. The pits fall nicely into the clear plastic cup. With some little practice you can go through an ice cream bucket full of cherries in a half hour. You'll have to empty the clear plastic cup of pits a few times, you may have a few misfires, and will have to send a cherry or two back through to get the pit, but for 99 out of 100 times, you'll get the pit. The pitter could be taller, that would make the selection of cherry catching dishes you can put under it wider, and that could allow you to pit for longer stretches of time, but that is the only flaw in this device. A friend and I marveled at the beautiful simplicity of it. Pitting cherries is a laborious process, and this invention is an ingenious improvement, so far advanced above any other device on the market, if cherry pitting were a more common activity, it would take its place beside the cotton gin and the steam engine as a great invention. I have my 70's model, but I bought a second one, because I have a cherry tree, and when the cherries are ripe, I can press a family member into service. With two of these working at once, next year's cherries will go like lightning. If you have a tree, you owe it to yourself to buy one.

Cherries have to be the best fruit of the summer, and the most difficult to work with. You’re stuck either indelicately spitting pits into a cup, or painstakingly pitting them one at a time while getting red splatter everywhere. Unless you have one of these. I have purchased 3 different cherry pitters only to be bitterly disappointed because they jam, or crush the fruit, or are tedious and leave you stuck punching holes one at a time through your pounds of fruit. But not this one, this is the holy grail. The hopper tray holds about a half cup at a time iand punches through them so easily. You gently nudge the cherries towards the chute as you go along and that’s it. I was able to get through 3 lbs of cherries in 15 minutes. This would typically take me an hour or more. If you live in a place like I do where the season for cherries is short and expensive, you buy as much as possible on sale and freeze or can them and eat them like crazy for just a few weeks. So15 minutes feels a bit like a miracle to have days worth of fresh fruit or a nice batch to put away for later. This machine was easy to put together, it’s easy to take apart and clean, and it clamps to the edge of my counter with no difficulty. I wish the hopper was a bit bigger, and I wish it was steel and not plastic, since this is the kind of tool you know you’ll use heavily and worry you’ll wear out. But I swear I’ve looked high and low and this is the best one on the market for any home cook. If it breaks I’ll be back for another.

My suggestion is to have just the right touch on the trigger so it comes up and down all the way. it’ll automatically pop them out so you don’t have to stick your finger in there and get it kind of do it quick a credit card slot… and it will come all the way up don’t leave your hand on the trigger . Let it come all the way back up. perfect!

I have been using a single pitter for years, but with the number of cherries I pit during cherry season, I decided it was time to upgrade. I received the pitter just in time to pit 6 pounds of cherries. Something that would have been a daunting task before took me about 30 min. and that included some time to figure out how to mount and use the pitter. My cherries were a little soft so they tended to stick to the plunger, but I quickly learned how to plunge and release to get the cherries to release better. Unfortunately, the black knob on the handle sheered off about 3/4 of the way through my cherries, leaving me a sharp stub to complete my pitting. We used an industrial strength glue to fix it because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of a return/exchange. Despite the cons listed below, I would still recommend this pitter when you have large volumes of cherries to work with.Pros:You can quickly pit a large number of cherries without too much wear and tear to your handsLarge pit container to collect the discarded pitsCons:Splatter - there is no guard to prevent sending cherry juice all over your counter...and youDepth and location of vice grip - the vice grip was just barely wide enough to fit on my granite counter top, and it has to fit one direction so I couldn't place it where it would work best for me.Plastic - the handle broke off the first time I used it.