Pears, Beautiful Pears

basket of pears

Just a small fraction of the pears we received.

Recently, one of Chief’s coworkers blessed us with a HUGE crate full of pears (easily 50-100lbs) that she couldn’t use on her own. A lot of these pears had some blemishes, and several weren’t yet ripe, but they tasted delicious and would make for some good snacks.

We freeze dried several trays worth of them for snacks. Freeze dried apple slices are some of our favorite treats, so we were looking forward to adding pears to the mix. We also canned some pear slices with some cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks (they came out DELICIOUS), but quickly realized that coring, peeling, and slicing over 25lbs of pears didn’t fill up nearly as many quart jars as we thought…

Three of the four quarts of pears we ended up with… One had to be tested for science.

I was not looking forward to the prospect of manually peeling this many pears (my apple peeler/corer/slicer wasn’t really working well with the pears since they were far too tender), when I happened upon a recipe for pear sauce that DID NOT need to be peeled (and if I’d had a food mill, I wouldn’t even have had to core them, either).

I used the following recipe (based on about 4-5 different recipes for apple sauce)

Using an immersion blender

Blending it up with an immersion blender. It doesn’t look appetizing, but it tastes amazing.

Pear Sauce

  • 3lbs pears, cored

  • 1/2 C water

  • 2 tbs lemon juice

  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon

  • 1 tsp ground cardamom

  • 1/2 tsp ground ginger

    In a large pot, simmer together all of the ingredients on medium-low heat, stirring occasionally. When the pears are tender and easily mash under a fork (about 20-25 minutes), use a potato masher or immersion blender until it’s your preferred consistency (longer for smoother pear sauce, shorter if you prefer your pear sauce to be chunkier).

I ended up making a quadruple batch, which filled 24 half-pint jars and left us with a good serving to try immediately. I went on to process the half-pint jars in a water-bath canner for 20 minutes to make sure they were shelf stable.

jars of pear sauce

Fresh out of the canner, waiting for them to cool… They all sealed well!

The Chief will definitely enjoy having a jar of this in his lunch!

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