Day 41: Today's Pick — A Cherry Pitter That Earned Its Drawer Space

I bought a cherry pitter on a whim in 2023, expecting to use it twice during cherry season and forget about it. I have used it every single cherry season since, and I have, embarrassingly, started buying more cherries than I used to because the pitting friction is gone.

This is a small, specific, weirdly delightful kitchen tool, and I am here to argue for its drawer space.

What it is

The Westmark Kirschmax (literally "Cherry Max") is a small lever-action cherry pitter. You drop a cherry into a small cup, squeeze the lever, and a thin steel pin pushes the pit through the cherry and into a clear plastic reservoir. The cherry comes out the bottom, intact, with a small hole where the pit was.

It costs $19. It is, hand-to-hand, the most satisfying single kitchen tool I own.

Why it earned drawer space

Three reasons:

1. It changed my cherry consumption. I used to eat cherries with the pits in, spitting them out, with the slight social weirdness of cherry-pit-spitting. Now I pit a bowl in 8 minutes and eat them like grapes. Cherry consumption is up roughly 4x since I bought it.

2. It transforms cherry recipes. Cherry galette, cherry preserves, cherry-vanilla ice cream, dark cherry compote on yogurt — all of these used to be 30-minute prep jobs because pitting a pound of cherries by hand is genuinely slow. Now they're 8-minute prep jobs. I make cherry desserts much more often.

3. It works on olives. The pit-pushing mechanism that works on cherries also works on small green olives. Pitted olives are 3x the price of unpitted olives at most stores. The pitter pays for itself in olives in about a year for an olive-eating household.

What it does well

• Bing cherries (the standard variety)
• Most Rainier cherries (the largest specialty cherries don't fit)
• Sour cherries (perfect)
• Most green and black olives
• Some small plums (the cup is the limit)

What it doesn't do well

• The very largest specialty cherries (won't fit in the cup)
• Cherries with very soft flesh (mush; use a knife instead)
• Multiple cherries at once (slower than the cherry-throwing-arc method on a pitter that handles a whole row)

On single-purpose tools

The "no single-purpose tools in the kitchen" advice (Alton Brown's gospel) is, mostly, correct. Most kitchen gadgets fail because they do one thing and that one thing is rare or marginal. The cherry pitter narrowly survives this test because: (1) it does one thing well enough that it changes my behavior around cherries, (2) cherries are seasonal but the season is long, (3) the tool also does olives, and (4) the price is low enough that even modest use justifies the drawer space.

I would not buy a single-cherry pitter for someone who eats cherries twice a year. I would buy one for someone who already eats cherries, because the pitter will increase their cherry consumption.

This is the test for any single-purpose tool: does it remove enough friction to change behavior? Sometimes the answer is yes.

How to actually buy

Westmark Kirschmax — about $19, available everywhere. The "stoner" model (which handles a whole pound at once) is also good but takes more storage space and isn't faster per cherry.

Tomorrow: a small Italian aperitivo brand that has, somehow, become my entire drinks cabinet.