Chef’n’s cherry pitter 2.0 makes less of a mess

I really liked the Chef’n QuickPit Cherry Pitter that I wrote about last year, so when I saw there was a newer version I had to check it out.

The description for this version says the “pusher holds up to 30 pits at a time.” I thought that meant I would be able to pit several cherries at once. I was wrong.

This new pitter, called the NEW QuickPit Cherry Pitter Preserve Prep Lid at chefn.com, is part of the company’s Pickle + Preserve line, consisting of several gadgets that can be screwed onto wide-mouthed Mason jars.

I haven’t yet tried pickling or preserving, but I thought if this new device pitted a bunch of cherries all at once with minimal cleanup, that would be awesome.

>> How it works: Screw gadget to jar and place a cherry in the middle of the lid (Yes, just one cherry. I was wrong in my assumption that it could do more than that.) Push cherry down quickly with plunger to remove pit. When lifting the plunger, make sure the red part of the lid lifts, too. This allows the pitted cherry to drop into the jar. Continue until jar is filled or plunger can’t hold any more pits.

>> Does it work? Yes! Just make sure the red section of the lid lifts with the plunger, which I failed to do on my first round of testing, resultiing in cherry carnage as the cherries collected in the lid.

>> Pros: The plunger keeps all the pits in one place so they’re easy to dump. The cherries are all collected in the jar so the gadget can be removed and the jar sealed for quick storage. It’s pretty fast. I pitted 29 cherries in 2 minutes and 39 seconds, which is about the same time it took me with the cherry pitter I tested last year, but with this new device I didn’t have pits flying everywhere.

>> Cons: Sometimes the cherries got stuck in the lid or were so big that the skin got scraped off going through the lid. Out of the cherries I pitted eight were mangled in some way. Some juice did squirt out. (Make sure the red part of the lid is down when pressing the plunger. This lessens the juice splatter.)

>> Cost and availability: $9.99 at chefn.com (UPS SurePost free shipping), and $14.95 at amazon.com (free shipping for orders over $25) and williams-sonoma.com ($15.99 shipping)

>> Worth it?: It’s not as fun and cute as the first pitter, but it’s just as fast and less messy. So, for $9.99, it’s pretty good.

Got a gadget that you love? Curious about one you’d like us to test? Email crave@staradvertiser.com or write Crave, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 7 Waterfront Plaza, Suite 210, Honolulu 96813.