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...

Making Pear Butter

Tricia purchased a case of organic pears from Azure Standard, a co-op that we belong to, since our little pear trees did not produce any pears this year.  We were going to get a case of apples, but they were a little pricey.  I don't know what happened to our pear trees. They just weren't happy this year. Tricia peeled the best looking pears from the box and sliced them up and froze them in freezer bags so that we'll have pear pies and pear cobbler over the winter.

At the bottom of the box there were some pears that were bruised up and soft and didn't look very appetizing, but you know what?  They are going to make something that makes my taste buds get happy just thinking about it - Pear Butter!  Just like apple butter, but made from pears.  We found the recipe at a website called www.gimmesomeoven.com.  You can make some good stuff from things that don't look so appetizing anymore.  I used to work in our family grocery store and every day we'd go through the produce on the display and remove the produce that wasn't very pretty and thus wouldn't sell.

Lots of people might throw things away when they don't look nice, but some of that stuff is the best. I can still remember Bumby's (my grandmother's) banana bread and banana pudding with vanilla wafers in it that she made from the bananas that were totally brown and soft.  Not much went to waste at the Kinder Supermarket.

The bottom of the barrel

I picked out the most over-ripe pears and weighed out 3 pounds.

3 Pounds of ugly pears

Then I peeled them with a potato peeler and pulled out the stems.  They were very soft in my hands and it made a mess!  I cut them in half and carefully cut out the seeds and any of the core that was hard.

Peeled Pears

Once that was done I laid them out on the cutting board and diced them up into little cubes.

Slice 'em and dice 'em

Tricia spooned all that into a pot and added 3 Tablespoons of honey that was robbed from my buddy's bees, 1 Tablespoon Lemon Juice that we juiced and froze from some lemons given to us last winter, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon salt, a dash of ground nutmeg, and a smidgen of ground cloves, making sure that we measured the dash and smidgen accurately (ha ha). 

All the ingredients added to the pot

We stirred it all up and brought it to a boil and then turned the heat down to medium and let it simmer for about an hour with the lid cracked open.  Every once in a while, we'd peek in and stir it.  It will gradually thicken and the smell will attract everyone to the kitchen.  The concoction will bubble to the top with a big "blub" and you just can't wait to taste it!

Bubbling Pear Butter

After about an hour, your pear butter is done.  You can pour all this into a food processor and puree it into a finer consistency or you could leave it chunky.  It was a "school night" and was late and we really didn't feel like washing the food processor and blade, so our pear butter is going to be the chunky variety.  I think it will 'eat' just fine.

The finished product ready to spoon into jars

We used a canning funnel to transfer the pear butter into canning jars.  Once it cooled, we moved it to the refrigerator.  The recipe that we found online Here says that it will keep for a week in the fridge. We'll eat some and will freeze the rest to be able to enjoy the sweet-spicy goodness on a winter morning atop homemade biscuits.

Pear Butter all canned up

This almost just isn't fair to show you this next 'spoon shot' of the warm pear butter. Doesn't that look good?

A spoonful of delicious pear butter

Can't wait to have some of that slathered over some hot biscuits!