Pears: From the Tree to the Shelf

Pears are not really the easiest harvest to manage, and this year The Gardener had a bumper crop.  Pears are kind of high maintenance in this Southern California climate.

In an ideal world, pears would mature in the fall.  They experience the natural chill of the coming winter while still hanging on the tree.  To ripen, pears need exposure to cold followed by about a week off the tree.  When you can pinch up next to the stem with your thumb and forefinger and the pear gives just a bit, it’s ripe and ready to eat.

That whole chill-on-the-tree thing doesn’t work in these parts.  The pears become mature in mid-summer and thus the harvest begins during some of the warmest months of the year.  In order to experience the chill, they need to go in the refrigerator for a week or so.  This is kind of the reverse of the sweet potato conundrum in which case they need to be cured in a warm place before using.  I don’t know about your refrigerator, but it’s a stretch to fit two bushels of pears in mine.  We managed, but it required The Gardener to stagger the harvest with each batch taking a turn in the fridge.

As the pears came out of the refrigerator, the Harvest Manager planned successive weekends for sharing, canning, and otherwise preserving.  We took

Canned Pears

a large dish of poached pears to a garden party, canned 16 quarts, and will soon be stirring up some pear butter.  We also eat what we can and give them away when visiting friends and family.

Canning pears is not hard, just time consuming.  You have to peel each pear, core and slice, submerge it in lemon water to keep it from turning brown, heat it in syrup, put it in a jar, and then put the jar in a water bath.  I can strongly recommend a melon baller for scooping out the core.  I’m not going to reproduce the canning recipe here, as it’s very standard and easy to find.  Here’s an overview from the United States Department of Agriculture with some specifics about pears.

I can strongly recommend the poached pears recipe from Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food.  Her poaching syrup, which includes lemon zest and cinnamon, makes a lovely canning syrup as well.

Soon to be pear butter. I’m guessing this will yield about five pints

For the pear butter, still on the schedule for this weekend as the pears ripen on the counter, I’m going to turn to the old reliable Stocking Up, page 271.

A word to the wise – If your Gardener doesn’t have a pear tree, try to keep it that way.  Managing the harvest will not be a small undertaking in the event there’s a bumper crop.