Asian Pears (peeled, cored and cut into quarters or halves)
1 1/2 cup sugar
We have an Asian Pear tree, it gives us delicious pears every year. This year was no different but they were small, really small. They still were tasty to eat, but I didn’t want to just bite into one because of a worry about worms. I wondered what can I do with all these pears cluttering up my counter space. In case you did not know you pick pears early and let them ripen off the tree. If they ripen on the tree they become very mushy and lose their flavor.
Craig suggested drying them, but I thought that was a lot of work besides just cutting, coring and peeling them; you have to cut them into very thin slices. So I decided to try and make pearsauce just like applesauce. We still had to peel, core and cut but the small pieces were quarters and Craig even just left them as halves.
Since this took a little bit of time, probably about 1 hour, I let the cut pieces soak in cold water to prevent browning. Once we were finished with this, I drained the water off, placed the pears in a stock pot and covered with water. I brought them to a boil and let them cook about 10 minutes, until soft. Then I drained this water off, let the pears cool just slightly about 5 minutes, placed half in my blender and blended until there were no chunks left. I did the same to the other half. By this time I had about 6 cups of blended pears. Place the pears back into the stock pot, add 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar and let simmer for about 5 minutes to dissolve the sugar.
I suppose you could bottle this afterwards but it was already 10:45 on a Saturday night and I did not want to stay up any later. I choose to place the sauce into 3 – 2 cup size freezer containers and freeze the sauce.
I keep 1 for eating and the other 2 are in the freezer for later eating in the season. I really am not sure how well these will be unthawed but I think it is quite tasty right now.
I am sorry I don’t know exactly how many pears we used about 3 times this bowl worth.
If your pears are normal size it might not take as long to prepare. I don’t think I would buy pears to do this and I believe you probably could use any pear such as Bartlett, not just Asian.
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