Thursday 8 March 2012

Pear Season!

Pears. What would we do without them?

March is the peak season (in Australia) for William pears and a bunch of other varieties, which makes it the perfect time to make your preserves. Pears are cheap, plentiful, high quality, and in theory you could make your whole year's worth of preserves right now.

Quite some time ago my best friend sent me a link to recipe and asked if it could be done failsafe. A really quick look at the ingredients told me that it practically was. It was a recipe for Pear and Vanilla Bean Honey and quite frankly, it looked divine. I made it and, lo and behold, it was divine. My son ate it at every opportunity, on toast, on sandwiches, on (homemade) crumpets, on scones, on ice cream and straight from the jar.



Here is my adaptation (it makes way more than the original, because really, why bother to make one jar when you can make five).







Pear and Vanilla Bean Honey

Ingredients
  • 12 ripe pears, peeled, cored and quartered 
  • 1 1/2 cups water
  • 1/2 vanilla bean
  • 3 1/2 cups white sugar
  • 1/2 tsp citric acid
Method
  1. Pop your pears into a large saucepan with the water, bring to the boil and simmer until the pears are very soft and squishy.
  2. Push the pears and the liquid through a sieve - and no you can't just put them in the food processor, because with the sieve you get rid of all the thick fibres which would get stuck in your teeth and ruin the texture.
  3. Put back into cleaned pot. Split the vanilla bean and add the seeds and the pod. Add the sugar and the citric acid.
  4. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for about 45 minutes.
  5. Pour into hot, sterile jars and once it is cool store in the fridge. This is not preserved as well as jam, it is far too liquid and I can't say that it would keep safely out of the fridge.





6 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for your lovely recipies. This looks sooo yummy!
    I am a celiac and we just went failsafe ten days ago. My failsafe friend sent me the link to your blog.
    I really appreciate your advanced cooking experience in this department.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for visiting my little blog and for the nice comment. I hope you get a bit of inspiration here, it can be hard to come by with such limited foods.

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  2. Hi. Is there anything else I can use to sub for citric acid? Would powdered vitamin C work?

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    Replies
    1. Yes, you could use vitamin c, but to be honest you could leave it out all together.

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  3. Hi, Can you do the same recipe with tin pears if preparing outside pear season?

    Thanks
    Kelly

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    Replies
    1. Hi Kelly, You can use tinned, but you would just need to adjust the quantity of sugar as the tinned pears are already sweetened.
      :)

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