'Tis the season for poached pears

Grab hold of pear season

Hello!

Christmas season is in full swing here and I don’t know about you, but I’m so ready to swing my legs up for 12 days of Christmas and then some.

I have written about poached pears before, which only goes to show how much I LOVE them. (I can’t fathom anyone not liking a good poached pear.) But I wanted to give you a more general guideline to poaching pears your way. I think now’s a great time to do that for a super simple, elegant showstopper of a dessert for your Christmas table.

I found lots of bosc pears in the supermarket a few days ago and got round to poaching some pears for Christmas today (never too early, I tell ya). Like most poached fruit, poaching pears in advance before you want to use them and then letting them sit in your poaching liquor to mature/age does wonders. If a recipe tells you to poach fruit and then use it immediately, you really should question the author. (Ok jk let’s not be too hard on people.) I like letting pears sit in their liquor for a week minimum, and as long as a few months. Provided you are storing them in sterilised containers and in the back of your fridge.

Some pears are just better than others

As you know, good pears are hard to come by here. My favourite types are bosc and conference, which are very difficult to come by, and I pretty much never go near the packhams. Packhams seem to be plucked very unripe and as as result are so hard and flavourless. Once, I bought some and let them sit for like two weeks on the kitchen counter but they were still not enjoyable. Some may even taste astringent at the point of eating. Some may say packhams are good for poaching because they’re sturdy, but give me flavour over sturdiness any day. After all, poaching is a form of cooking and you should always adjust your cooking based on the ingredient you’re using. If your pear is a little riper, simply poach for a shorter period of time, remove from liquid, then let flavour in the fridge with time.

A good quality pear has honeyed, floral notes. While I adore eating them fresh to really give them the respect they deserve, I do close an eye for poached pears because there’s just something about having a cold, poached pear for dessert (especially for Christmas - thought I’d mention that yet again) that screams romance.

Of course, ripe pears (not to the point of mush) are the best to use here, for flavour purposes. Unripe pears have no character and will only taste like your poaching liquor. If you can spare a pear to try, that’s ideal. If not, you could go by firmness and aroma.

Type of wine or liquid to use

Pears are commonly poached in red or white wine, or a spiced aromatic liquor/syrup spiked with tea.

Personally, my favourite is marsala wine. Marsala has notes of raisin, is very slightly floral and honeyed, which accentuates the flavour of pears very nicely and really lets them come into their own. If you haven’t tried it, please do — it’s spectacular.

White wine and red wine are the most common. Whether it’s sweet or dry, both will work. If you, like me, are intimidated by the extensive choice of mediocre wines at our disposal that cost more than they should in supermarkets here, don’t fret. Just go for something that’s not expensive, because you’re going to cook off the alcohol and harsh tannins should dissipate. There’s all types of wines with notes of “tobacco, pepper” blahblah, but you can pretty much ignore them. But don’t quote me.

For white wines, I abhor chardonnay and its “butteriness" or “roundedness” just does things to my palate. A safe bet would be sauv blanc / pinot grigio / pinot gris / a blend. As for red wines, most are okay — cab sav / merlot / zinfandel / yada yada. A moscato would work too.

Adjusting for sweetness

As we know, dry whites = less sweet, so this is how you want to adjust for sugar.

We’re approaching 2024 so please just get a 1g scale already. Escali has very affordable scales on Amazon (I’m not an Amazon partner, unfortunately) in very lovely colours so maybe gift yourself one for Christmas. It’ll save you from washing tons of dumb measuring spoons and cups etc.

So. You want to adjust for sugar using a percentage relative to the weight of the amount of wine you’re using. We always want to start low

If using wine that is not sweet (any wine except moscato, sweet marsala), start at 10% sugar. So, for example, if you are using 700g of wine (700ml), you’ll want to add 70g of sugar. You should use either regular granulated sugar here or raw sugar. Do not use brown sugar or muscovado (anything with molasses) as we do not want to taint the flavour of wine with molasses. I don’t think that’s a flavour pairing. Don’t use caster sugar here unless inflation isn’t real to you.

If you’re using a fortified/sweetened wine, start at 5% sugar. So for 750ml of wine, add 38g of sugar.

Once you get your poaching liquid up to a boil and the sugar has dissolved, here’s where you want to taste for sweetness. Does it need more sugar? If so, add in 1-2% increments. Remember, you can always add but you can’t subtract. You want your poaching liquid to be mildly sweet, as in the sweetness shouldn’t hit you right in the front, but should be the middle note. If that makes sense? Keep in mind that as you poach, water will evaporate and your liquid will get sweeter.

Several recipes out there call for way more sugar, but this masks the flavour of the pears and we’re not here looking to make canned fruit and waste an entire bottle of wine.

For the pears today, I used about half a bottle of wine and some sweet red vermouth I had lying in the fridge for a year, and added about 8-9% sugar.

Spicing the poaching liquid your way

There are some common spices that are called for in poached pears, but you don’t have to follow them strictly. Hate star anise? Leave it out. Not a fan of cinnamon? Ditch it. Always think about spices that are going to have affinity with your poaching liquid and fruit.

Here are some combinations you could try:
- Red wine: ceylon cinnamon, orange peel, cloves, black peppercorn
- White wine: ginger, cardamom, lemon peel
- Marsala: ceylon cinnamon, timur pepper

Timur pepper is excellent to bring out the floral quality inherent in pears. It’s a relative of the sichuan pepper, but with no spice, and a strong grapefruit aroma.

I personally do not like lemon or orange peel in my poached pears as I always want my pears to have a deep flavour and lemon/orange just seems a bit bright.

How much spices to add is really up to you. If you want a particular flavour to shine, you can add more. If you’ll be aging your pears for a while with the spices in the jar, know that the flavour of the spice can really come through with time. Using a smaller amount of spice can help to contain that note in the background to complement the flavour of the pear. But if you’re a spiced person, go for it. Here’s how much of each spice I usually add:

• Cinnamon: 1 2-3” stick

• Clove: 1 - 2 pieces

• Star anise: ½ - 1 piece

• Black peppercorn/ timur pepper: ½ - 1 tsp

• Cardamom: 3 pods, crushed

• Lemon / orange peel: 1 strip, 2-3” in length, 1cm wide

Okay, now we’ve got all that covered.

How to poach

* One bottle of wine (750ml) is sufficient to poach 6 pears.

1. Combine wine with sugar and spices in a pot. Bring to boil, reduce heat, then let simmer for 5 minutes. Taste at this point! Adjust for sweetness.

   

2. Meanwhile, peel pears, half and core. You could core and keep them whole using a corer, but you’ll want to make sure your pears aren’t too slender as this poses a risk of them breaking into half while you core them. I use a ½ teaspoon to

   scoop out the core. A good sign that your pear is a nice ripeness is that you’ll be able to scoop the cores out easily.

   

   

3. Add your pears to the poaching liquid. You can do this in two batches; just make sure they are submerged. Cover with a cartouche (a disposable lid made of parchment that you can make manually! Simply fold a square/rectangular piece of parchment into 4, then fold twice more till you get a cone. Place along the radius of pot to see where you should cut, then nip off the tip as well. Unfold and there you have it.)

   

   

4. Once cartouche is in, check if you need to reduce heat. As you know, when you cover a pot with lid, the internal pressure rises and then the temperature required for it to boil goes down etc. (physics ok?), and you don’t want it to be boiling! You want a gentle simmer. Set a timer for 5 minutes, then keep checking every 1-2 minutes. You’ll want to be able to easily pierce the pear with a sharp paring knife, without it falling apart. Please take into account that the pear continues cooking once out of the liquid, depending on how you rest it. E.g. if resting on a large tray where pears are not on top of one another, the cooking is pretty much arrested. But if piling up in a bowl, it doesn’t lose heat as quickly and will continue cooking and soften!

   

5. Once all pears are cooked, let pears and liquid cool before you stash away. Now. You should be sterilising your jars/containers in a proper way. BUT. If you are stashing your pears away for like two weeks or so, as long as you make sure your container is CLEAN and that your fridge temperature is right, you’ll be fine. If you want to age longer than that, please sterilise your jars.
   (I do this in a very ghetto way because.. it works for me. Don’t tell anyone, ok? BOIL water until it reaches a rolling boil, immediately pour into the heatproof container you are using (usually a glass jar) let sit for a minute, then carefully, with gloves, pour the boiling water out completely, and let sit to air dry until water evaporates and jar is dry. It is vital you do not use any paper towel to dry the insides as it defeats the whole sanitization purpose.)

6. Place pears in your container and then pour poaching liquid over. Make sure pears are submerged, then keep in fridge to age. They will continue taking on the colour of your poaching liquid.

7. If your poaching liquid is just shy of submerging your pears, simply place a layer of cling wrap or kitchen paper towel over to ensure the pears are in contact with the liquid, and try moving the pears around once every few days just so they get at equal chance at being exposed to the poaching liquid. (A simpler solution would be to just eat the pear that’s not submerged.)

   

Serve with clotted cream (Marks and Spencer sells it), creme fraiche, vanilla ice cream, a panna cotta, a lovely cake, etc.

Now, don’t toss your poaching liquid out. You can reduce it to have a lovely syrup to go along with whatever you’re serving it with, or use it to make a cocktail or mocktail or mulled wine (it technically already is mulled), etc. or make jelly!

Happy holidays!
xx
M.