Seasonal produce: the pear

"Seasonal produce" is a regular section from my newsletter, reconfigured here for your reading pleasure. I write it to ramp up my enthusiasm for eating seasonally—especially when I’m eating August swedes and dreaming of spring asparagus.

 

Autumn rolls around, and once again we are eating fresh, seasonal pears (i.e. not the disappointing coldstore ones available later in the year with the creepy brown centres).

I don’t love pears. As a rule I prefer a crisp, slightly tart apple.

In making that bold generalisation I add the caveat that I think pears taste pretty nice as a rule. My main issue is that they jump too quickly from rock hard and tasteless, to so ripe they’re almost impossible to eat without getting covered in juice. There is a pear-eating sweet spot that’s pretty hard to hit.*

Shannon, on the other hand, loves pears, so they feature pretty regularly in our fruit bowl—which gave me somewhere to start when we had some people over for dinner the other week (our oven is kaput so my normal go-tos like pies or cakes were out of the question). I ended up making maybe the most delicious emergency dessert ever. Simple! Light! Flavours! Pears!**

Poached pears with cinnamon sour cream gelato

The gelato is incredibly easy: I’d had the recipe in my clearfile for at least a year, and found it again recently. It’s a matter of just mixing a bunch of stuff together and throwing it in the freezer and is very, very good. The recipe is from Pear Nuallak (who writes a rather wonderful food blog).

My original plan was to serve the gelato with some fresh berries—I was growing raspberries in our Wellington veggie patch and am somewhat obsessed. However, we are kind of broke at the moment, we already had the pears, and I remember seeing Nigella poaching some peaches one time which seemed pretty easy.

Cinnamon sour cream gelato

Recipe from Pear Nuallak

• 1 can full-fat sweetened condensed milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• Couple of pinches of sea salt
• 300ml full-fat sour cream (I guesstimated this as in NZ we mostly have 250ml cartons of sour cream)

Whisk together the condensed milk, vanilla, cinnamon and salt. Add the sour cream and continue to mix until the whole melange is smooth and well-combined (I don’t think I did this terribly thoroughly as there were definitely parts of my gelato that were more “condensed milky” than others. Don’t be like me.).

Whack the whole lot in a container that can hold up to 1 litre, seal it, and put it in the freezer. Wait impatiently for 4ish hours until it’s frozen.

Poached cinnamon vanilla pears

Recipe adapted (slightly) from Taste.com.au

• 4 perfect brown pears (or, you know, whatever you’ve got)
• lemon juice 
• 1 cups sugar 
• 3 cups water
• vanilla bean, split, seeded
• cinnamon quill

Mix the sugar and water in a pan that will hold the fruit and liquid fairly snugly. Heat gently-ish until the sugar is dissolved, then simmer for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile peel the pears, leaving the stalk on them if you can. Rub them all over with lemon juice (this helps to stop them going brown—but if you moved quickly you could probably leave this step out). Put the pears and whole spices into the sugar syrup, and gently cook the lot for 15-20 minutes, until the pears are tender. Make sure that the pears are cooked evenly by turning them in the liquid a couple of times.

Next step I missed out, but: take the pears out of the liquid, and continue to cook the syrup until it’s reduced by about a third.

Finally: serve the gelato and pears together with a little of the syrup. You could reheat the pears if you’d like, but I didn’t bother (too lazy). It was *dancing lady emoji*.

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*Yes! There are lots of different kinds of pears. We seem to always end up with brown pears like Beurre Bosc though. I had a good experience with some little green crisp pears once but haven’t seen them since.

**In the event there was a delicious misunderstanding and our guests brought a delicious butterscotch nut pie-flan thing that was crazy delicious. We ate the pears and gelato over the last week. Much excellent, very recommend.