Pears, Pears, Pears!

Starting point: three bags of pears a neighbor left by the street free to any passerby and the timeliness of passing by on my bike with plenty of carrying capacity. I dug into recipes for pears, thinking of the bland, gritty canned pears of my childhood and determined to do something much more interesting.

One of the challenges of fruit preserving recipes is that some measure in number of pounds before prep, some in pounds after prep, and some in cups. Working with gleaned or windfall fruit often means cutting big chunks off to avoid bruises. I have to work my way through the proportions, measure what I have when I'm done with prep, and adjust.

A search for pear recipes led me to:

• Salted Caramel Pear Butter from Ball Mason; made in the slow cooker, which I think gave the sugar a slightly burned edge that I'm not crazy about so I should have turned it down to low much earlier; added 1 t. salt and 2 t. vanilla bean paste toward the end, the former to increase the salt factor and the latter hoping to offset the burned-ness. My home taste tester, Sweet Hubs, said it's fantastic anyway.
• Cinnamon Cardamom Pear Jam from Food in Jars; reduced sugar by 1 c and cinnamon by 1 t, added 3/8 t cardamom
• Gingered Pear Preserves: my version below
• Pickled Pears: my version below
• Pear Vanilla Caramel Sauce: Haven't made this yet but if I score more pears this Food in Jars recipe is first in line because it sounds amazing.

I didn't make all of these in one blow-out weekend. Some of the pears were ripe and I started with the pear butter and pear jam. A week later the rest of them were ready for me to turn them into gingered pear preserves and pickled pears.

Gingered Pear Preserves

Working from Ball Mason Jars Gingered Pear Preserves Recipe, based on the sugar proportions from NCHFP and the white/brown proportions from Serious Eats Pear and Ginger Preserves Recipe, I ended up with:

• 8 cups chopped pears, the yield from approx. 10 pounds of pears with the bruised bits cut out
• 6 T. crystallized ginger, chopped fine (I started with 4 T., increased toward the end after tasting; this is all about personal preferences)
• 2-1/2 T. ginger paste (from a tube; go for it if you want to spend time peeling and chopping fresh ginger; don't put all of this in to begin with so you can taste and adjust)
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 8 T. bottled lemon juice (bottled because that has a consistent acidity level, which is important for safe canning)
• White sugar: 2-1/2 cups
• Brown sugar: 3/4 cup

The gelling time in the Serious Eats recipe was much more accurate for me than in the NCHFP recipe--definitely not gelling 15 minutes into the cook time. It went more like 30 minutes and to be honest I'm not sure I really reached the full gel stage when I look at the movement of the product in the jars. My impatience may have gotten to me at that point; I've done a lot of canning since the beginning of September.

My yield: 4 half-pints, 6 quarter-pints (so cute, that size! and great for gifts)

Pickled Pear Recipe

Some recipes use whole spices, some use ground. Ratios of fruit, sugar and vinegar vary across recipes. The National Center for Home Food Preservation is a trusted source with testing behind every recipe. Their proportion is 8 pounds fruit, 8 cups sugar, 4 cups vinegar, 2 cups water. The thing is, the sweetness of the fruit will vary a bit. Since this isn't a preserve that needs to gel, the sugar functions for flavor balance with the vinegar. That to me says it's safe to reduce the sugar if the fruit sweetness is high. Where I landed:

• Pears: 4 lbs, peeled, cored, cut in slices or chunks or left in quarters or eighths, depending on the size of the pear 
• Vinegar: 1-1/3 c. (I used white wine vinegar; you could use plain distilled white vinegar, or one of the darker vinegars if you don't mind the color effect; could even deliberately go for a pretty rose effect using red wine vinegar or an unsweetened berry vinegar like raspberry vinegar or blackberry vinegar)
• Water: 1 c.
• Sugar: 1-1/4 c.
• Cinnamon: 3/4 t.
• Ginger: 3/4 t.
• Cloves: 1/8 t.
• Mace: 1/8 t.
• Salt: 1/4 t.

Yield: 3 pints that I haven't taste-tested yet.

More Pickled Pear Recipes

• Spiced Pickled Pears by Adventures in Pickling
• Spiced Pickled Pears by Headspace
• Pickle Pears by Pickles Travel
• Pear Pickles by National Center for Home Food Preservation