The Amazing Acerola Cherry

Sheryl Stark
May 10, 2015
2 min read

I recently found out that when I cook I never taste, measure, nor set a timer so please bear with me, as my husband and I share some new, exciting, and creative Jamaican Dishes with you. So after saying all that, the amount of ingredients is based on the amount of folks you are entertaining. Imagine having fun while staying healthy…the new trend indeed. And yes…my dishes always turn out delicious. Yeah man.

Growing up on Cumberland Road, in Spanish Town, my siblings and I loved to climb over the fence into Miss Amy’s yard for cherries, particularly Acerola also known as Barbados cherries. We would pretend that Miss Amy would come out from amongst the trees, with her frail, small frame and chase us. I sometimes though she did, just to add a little excitement to our adventure. She was such a kind old lady. The thing was we did not need to climb over her fence for cherries, seeing that we had one such tree in our own front yard. The cherries were easy to pick and were very sweet with a flowery flavor and were juicy. The tree seemed to always have cherries on it and another thing I noticed, a cherry will ripen by the end of the day. That amazed me back then, but little did I know how much nutrients one of the cherries have. One Acerola cherry has 65 times more vitamin C than an orange. This is one of the reasons why we never had the flu growing up, because the vitamin C content is about the daily minimum requirement for the body. Below is a list of reasons to plant one of these trees or cook with the cherries and why some companies are using the Acerola cherry in baby food.

Health Benefits; due to such high vitamin C content the cherry can help with the following: