Pears ready to be cooked. If you look closely, you can see the juices from the pears.
My cut up pears were waiting on me this morning. After sitting all night, the sugar has drawn out the juices from the pears. Dumped them into a large pot, put them on a stove burner & turned the heat on high. When they started bubbling, I turned the heat down to medium. Then it was just a matter of letting them cook while occasionally stirring them. The mixture needed to be cooked until the pears were translucent & the liquid thickened. It takes at least 45 minutes to reach that stage.
Then it was just a matter of pouring the preserves into jars then placing the lids & rings on the jars. At that point, I put them in a water bath for 10 minutes. I heard 4 out of 5 jars pop just as soon as the jars hit the air. Some of these will be given away as gifts so I poured some of the preserves into jelly jars. Now I just need to decide if I want to make another batch of pear preserves or not.
The finished jars of pear preserves. All they need now is a label.
Where I was so fortunate to have so many pears, I spent part of yesterday evening looking for new recipes for pears. I found cakes, breads, fruit spreads, pies and even mincemeat recipes. Getting a little bit tired of cake at the moment, I decided to try one of the pie recipes today.
The recipe I used was Pear Crumb Pie from allrecipes.com. As soon as the preserves were done, I started on the pie. I had a couple of pie crusts in the freezer so I cheated & used one of them for the pie. Naturally, the most time consuming thing about preparing the pie was peeling & slicing 6 cups of pears. Jim offered to peel them for me, but I knew he was anxious to get downstairs & piddle around in his workshop so I told him no thanks. Sarah’s boyfriend was over for the afternoon so naturally, she had no interest in helping.
Because my crust was already made, it only took about five minutes to mix the filling for the pie once the pears were cut. It smelled wonderful when baking. The pie browned nicely & was an attractive dish when it came out of the oven.
The freshly baked Pear Crumb Pie cooling off.
Once it had time to cool down, Jim & I had to check it out! I was quite pleased with it. I am sure I’ll make that pie again sometime. Jim told me he thought it tasted just like an apple pie. That wasn’t quite so, but the truth is that if you didn’t tell someone what type of pie it was, they could easily mistake it for an apple pie. A person has to be paying very close attention to the taste of the fruit to notice that it’s definitely pear and not apple.
Sarah has been anxious for me to make some apple turnovers so I think I’ll try making some pear ones in a few days. I think an apple turnover recipe would work fine.
Tags: fresh pears, fruit, pear pie, pear preserves, pears