Pears, Revisited

I recently posted about canning pears. Since then, the neighbors gave me another bushel of pears from their wonderful tree. Canning them, as I did, was very time consuming, so being anxious to find something easier to do with them, I decided to make Pear Sauce. Here is what I did. First, wash the pears:



Next, get the steamer ready:



Cut the top where the stem comes out off of each pear:



Cut in half:



Remove cores:



Fill top of steamer:



Put on the lid and steam until pears are very well cooked:



Drain off the juice:



Put the cooked pears through a food mill (Mine is a Foley Food Mill.) Add a pinch of salt, Sucanat to taste and a little ground cinnamon.



Fill pint jars, adjust caps, process in a water bath canner for 20 minutes:



Fill pint jars with the juice and process those for 10 minutes in a water bath canner:



Last week, I had a disaster. I had some pears left from the first batch and I needed to use them up quickly. I thought I would make some "Pear Butter" like apple butter. I washed cut and steamed the pears, but did not remove the cores. Big mistake! Pears have lots of the little hard cells called sclerenchyma, and they seem to be concentrated in and around the core. My pear butter, when it was done, was crunchy! The compost pile loved it.

So, this time, I took out the cores, and made the sauce thicker by juicing the pears first. This made lovely thick sauce. I think you will enjoy it.

If you do not have a juicer, you can simply put a small amount of water in a heavy-bottomed kettle and steam the pears until they are very soft. Then, strain them, reserving the liquid, if you like. And of course, this sauce may be frozen instead of canned.