SFist in the Kitchen: European Pears
Certain summer fruits—tomatoes and peaches come to mind—are poster children for farmer's markets. When these ingredients are bound for the supermarket, they're picked way too early and stored in taste-damaging conditions.
We've always thought the European pear (as opposed to its expensive Asian cousin) was more forgiving. It keeps well in a cool environment, allowing a producer to stretch the season for months. It ripens off the tree so you can pick it when mature and still get it to the store before it's at its best. You'd think it would be a grocer's dream.
But we've learned that a pear is finicky, and it's unlikely that a supermarket specimen will get the care it needs. A pear bruises easily, for one thing. Producers need to handle them carefully, says Alice Waters in Chez Panisse Fruit, to deliver a good product. As always, we urge you to evaluate vendors with the samples they offer. And though you can ripen pears in your home by snuggling them into a paper bag, Paul Bertolli writes in Cooking by Hand that getting the pears perfectly ripe can be frustrating. "Patient waiting, sometimes for weeks, often produces no observable change," he complains, "whereas it is also common to return, after what seems like a matter of hours, to find fruit that has transformed to a musky mess."
Photos by Melissa Schneider
All that effort is worth it. A perfect pear has a dense, buttery texture, the result of careful breeding in the 18th century. It has a distinctive and subtle aroma and a perfumed taste. Though Bartletts (known as Williams in the rest of the world) are at the tail end of their availability, the Bosc and the Anjou should be widely available for several months yet. You still have plenty of time to find a pear at its peak.
There are two mainstream uses for pears: Raw pear slices accompany salads or blue cheese, and chefs poach halves of the teardrop-shaped fruit in syrup until they acquire a meltingly soft texture. We prefer to poach unripe pears while serving ripe pears raw. But don't be limited by those scenarios. We've dipped chunks of pear into chocolate fondue, and we've baked them into a pie with brown sugar and butter. One of our all-time favorite sandwiches was a baguette stuffed with goat cheese, pear slices, and a thin drizzle of honey. Bring one of those to lunch at the office, and your co-workers will cry in their bland and uninteresting Togo's specimens. Or try the pear-ginger cake that Seattlest Molly wrote about. We wish the Seattlest test kitchen was a little closer to our own so we could help test the recipe. Or at least the result.
We poached some of our market haul in red wine, a treatment you'll often see: It adds flavor and makes the pears look like they're coated in red velvet. Halve pears and use a melon baller to scoop out the seeds. Stir 1 cup of sugar in a pot with a bottle of fruity red wine (we used Bonny Doon's Big House Red). You could add cinnamon sticks to the liquid for a spicier flavor. Add the pears, core side down, and bring the liquid to a simmer. Poach the pears gently until the flesh is tender, about twenty minutes. Flip the pears halfway through the cooking to ensure that both sides are evenly cooked. For a fancier treatment, pipe whipped Explorateur cheese into the scooped-out hole and reduce the poaching liquid after you remove the cooked pears to create a viscous sauce.
When we poached pears in a ginger-infused syrup, we chopped the cooked fruit and stuffed wonton wrappers with the dice. We deep-fried the dumplings until golden-brown, drained them on paper towels for a few minutes, and then rolled them in sugar. We loved the way the crunch of the fried wonton yielded to the tender, subtly gingered interior.
Got some more pear ideas? Let us know in the comments.