I like mine made into wine…although I did cook Italian sausages, onions, and green peppers today “sweated” by periodically adding pear wine to that until I’d added close to a full glass worth of the wine, so that was cooked I guess
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Enjoying the last month’s of winter eating pear sauce. This was cooked up with spices but pears are sweet enough that no sugar was wanted or needed. 2018 pears had a good flavor Here comes the 2018 apple & pear harvest! . Pear sauce and dried pears are among my favorites Easy on the Gardener and Orchardist Tricks
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I’m sure that would be fine.
I just cooked up the last of my dried Stacey pears, mixed with the last of the dried apples and strawberries - just add water and simmer. Add sweetener to taste (I added some stevia) - delicious. The pear skins are a bit chewey but are fine. I did make some straight pear juice this year (wonderful!!) but most of the harvest i dried to make sauce. Really looking forward to when I have more pears. Sue
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We love pear butter and pressing them for both fresh and hard pear cider.
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I used to make pear butter out of all the pears I had at my old house. It was a standard size tree, it was there when I bought the house, and it had a LOT of wonderful pears even with no spraying at all.
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This is my pear corer and peeler ive discussed in other threads I use for cooking. Great Tools are essential to good results in my opinion
A good knife is my best friend during the pear harvest which is just as important as a corer or peeler. I grab a favorite and use it the entire day oncebi start slicing with it. Most Henckels as an example will hold up
https://growingfruit.org/t/the-best-knives-in-the-world/18499
Can’t wait for pear season again! When it comes to drying pears this is the dehydrator I use which has held up Great for me.
One of these days I would love to get a copper pot to.make pear butter. There are a lot of great cooks on this forum .
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We had a huge harvest of tiny, sort of blah, Summercrisp pears that got ripe all at once and were falling from the tree before we even realized they were ripe. They were too small to bother peeling, so we quartered and cored them, threw them in freezer, peelings and all. Spread them partially thawed in a large cake pan, sprinkle a couple spoons of sugar on them (optional), mix up a package of generic yellow cake mix and spread it thinly over them and bake. The cake is best chilled. The peelings aren’t even noticeable. Addicting. Next year I will need to thin the pears!
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The design looks so much like my Nesco dehydrator
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There are lots of ways to cook or process pears. One of my favorite ways to eat pear is cut up and thrown into a stew or pot roast like a starchy vegetable. This is an especially good way to use some of an over-large crop before they are ripe.
I also like them in curries with sweet potato.
I can them in quarters in a light syrup. I have numerous recipes for this.
I make pearsauce (think applesauce).
I hope to get a deep freeze this year and freeze wedges for use in savory dishes. See above.
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I like to mix them with apples in a pie (or by themselves), make a baked pear “sauce” with intact wedges for granola, or, if I’m feeling ambitious, there’s nothing quite like poirs au vin rouge.
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I agree on having the right tools for the job. I prefer a tomato shark for coring pears. You just scoop out the stem and blossom ends, cut the pear in half, then scoop the cores. Takes seconds, and you waste very little. This is how we would process pears about a case at a time when I was a baker.
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We canned a dozen quarts of pears last fall, half in sugar and the other half in pear juice. The ones canned in pear juice not only taste much better (as you’d expect), but they actually seemed to have a strikingly better texture as well. I’m not sure why that would be unless the sugar syrup transfer heat better than the pear juice. They were all canned together at the same time. The sugar canned pears seem a little mushy.
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Canning them in apple juice or peach juice works good. My pears don’t juice they slurry. Years ago I thought I would make some pear cider but I found out pears don’t juice. My mom came to my rescue and made my mess into pear nectar. She added water which was odd to me. It’s how I learned to make pear sauce because i found out by blending the pear up i got pear sauce in the blender. Cooked the pears down and canned the sauce. Fought to try and get that juice but those pears were not have having it. Apples are easy to juice. Peaches I steam juiced then canned blackberries and pears in the juice.
I do a Tatin but replace apples with pears.With a honey glazing its just: divine! Marc
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My pears were an unknown variety which I assumed were Kieffer. They were fairly hard, so I didn’t have that problem. If I had sweated them like an apple I’m sure I would have had the same slurry problem.
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Yes pears are the only fruit I know of like that which cannot be juiced like everything else but there are always exceptions.
I’ve not really experimented with cooking them yet. I’ve added them in with apples when I either needed to use something up or stretch the mixture.
Mostly I eat them out of hand, but thin, raw slices in a salad or on a sandwich go nicely. They go nicely with wet, crumbly cheeses and toasted nuts.
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Pear crisp, pear up-side down cake, pear jam in Greek yogurt.
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