Last weekend I made lots of grape juice from some of my friend’s prolific grape harvest and turned most of it into 4 batches of grape jelly. I amped up the white grape jelly with an infusion of ginger that turned out quite nice. So this weekend, it was on to working with my two full sheet pans of pears. There are many different varieties of pears some of which include Anjou, Asian, Bartlett, Bosc, Comice, Concorde, Forelle and French Butter but I have no idea what variety I am working with. Pears ripen from the inside out so it is often difficult to tell when they are ripe. If there is some give at the top or neck of the pear they are considered ready to harvest but often still require several days of ripening for eating.
Most of my pears were still pretty hard so I went looking for a recipe using green pears and came up with pear preserves. This sweet tasty concoction requires cooking sliced pears for several hours after which time the juice thickens and they take on a dark translucent look kind of like orange marmalade but without pectin. In fact, the recipe called for a thinly sliced lemon which added natural pectin to the mixture which also included plenty of warm spices. I tried some on plain Greek yogurt which was heavenly but it will also be great on toast, pancakes, waffles and, of course, ice cream.
On Sunday, I made traditional chutney which includes onions and I added peppers and celery along with pears, raisins and plenty of warm spices. It has a bite to it but isn’t as sweet or vinegary as I like which means Paul will probably enjoy it. It cooked quickly so I removed some of the juice to thicken the chutney. This type of chutney compliments pork, chicken and most cheeses. Then in an attempt to clean out the freezer I pulled out some overripe frozen bananas and made banana bread adding some chopped pears to the batter. It is still in the oven but the batter was sure tasty.
After all this, the bad news is that there is still a full sheet pan of pears to process this coming week. The good news is that they are still green so I have time to figure out what to do with them. I think it’s going to be pear butter because I still have several jars of pear sauce from last year’s canning efforts. If I get even more ambitious, I might try using some in a pear crisp or pear tart and I read poached pears served with a warm vanilla custard sauce is divine. Anyway, it’s raining pears in my world!