Making Pear Sauce - 2015 Edition

Last week we talked about making a pear tart in THIS POST.  We have a whole case of pears and there are so many things to do with them.  Tricia doesn't really like apples or pears, but these are delicious.  These pears are good just eating plain, and although there is no chance of them going bad, we wanted to put some away so that we can enjoy them later.  So we grabbed a 6 pounds of pears from the fridge to make some Pear Sauce.  Actually is is more like Pear Butter, only without putting in the amount of sugar that called for.  Instead we used some local honey.  We used THIS RECIPE from Last Year's Pear Butter post.

Organic Bartlett Pears

We washed and chopped the pears up into chunks.  We didn't even peel them or core them. They went into a pot with about an inch of water in it and added the chopped pears as the water got heated up.  Once boiling, we turned the heat to medium and allowed them to cook until soft through and through.

We don't have a food mill.  This is on the wish list and we've been comparison shopping for one. Short of having a food mill, we just did like we always did and apply a little "elbow grease" to the pears, putting the cooked pears into a fine sieve over a bowl and pressed them through the sieve with a spatula.  The pear sauce is squeezed out into the bowl and the skins, seeds, stems and hard pieces of pear stay in the sieve.  We scoop this out after each batch where the refuse goes into a bowl for the chickens to devour later.

We put the pear sauce into a pot and added 6 Tablespoons of honey, 2 Tablespoons lemon juice, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon salt and a dash of nutmeg a little bit of ground cloves.and kept it warm.  Once we had our pint jars, lids, and rings sterilized, Tricia used a canning funnel and big ladle to add the warm pear sauce to the jars.  It smells nice and "fall-like".

Ladling it into the jars for canning

She filled them until they were 1/4 inch from the top and then put the Tattler lids and rings on and put them in a water bath, got the water boiling, began the timer and processed them for 15 minutes.

Processing in the Water Bath

Once the 15 minutes had passed, the jars were removed from the water bath with some canning tongs and allowed to cool.  Here are five pints of pear sauce (similar to apple sauce, but with a little more spice and sweetness.)

Ready for the pantry

Can't wait to enjoy this cross between pear sauce & pear butter!  A good fall snack...