I discovered the wonders of grilled fruit several years ago and I've been experimenting with fruit on the barbie ever since. Grilled cherries are one of my favorites and in Southern California the season is peaking right now, so it is easy to find well-ripened inexpensive and delicious cherries.
Grilled cherries dipped in chocolate is the perfect primal haute cuisine finish to a late spring/early summer cookout. You can put the ingredients on the grill while you're eating dinner and the coals are cooling down, and the cherries should be perfectly cooked by the time you're ready for desert.
This recipe is simple and delicious. Start with a bunch of dark ripe cherries, with the stems on. Put them in an open foil pouch, and put the pouch directly over the coals. Do the same with a bar of dark chocolate, broken into chunks. The darker the chocolate the better. You can use just half a bar if you're only serving a couple of people. As the cherries cook the flavours concentrate and they develop a wonderful cherry pie/maraschino cherry flavour. If you leave the chocolate on too long it will burn, but just a slight burn is nice, the bittersweet flavour of baked chocolate cake combined with some smokiness from the smoldering embers, is a great counterpart to the sweet cherries. Chocolate has a natural smokiness from the roasting process so you're really just augmenting flavours that were already there.
After about 20 minutes of low heat the cherries should be warm and slightly cooked. The chocolate will take less time.Dip the cherries in the chocolate and eat! That's it.
My friend Mike Levy deserves credit for the suggestion of serving a glass of port with this desert. It really is an amazing accompaniment. There are complimentary flavours of both the chocolate and the cherries in the port, and the wine creates a nice bridge between the two components.
