The Artisan at Work – Making Pear Preserves

Pears arrive

So we just got in our first seasonal shipment of local, organic, heirloom pears and apples from Wisconsin, and we’re using all that delicious fruit to make our Pear with Honey and Ginger preserves. This fall, we’ll jar up as much of the local stuff as we can, and hopefully those jars will last us through the winter!

Matt has refined the recipe to one we absolutely love, so now the production mainly involves a lot of nifty gadgets and some serious muscle power. Heirloom fruit is usually bred for flavor and texture instead of largeness or robustness. It tends to be more finicky, but that is only an incentive to figure out ingenious ways to make production manageable. Or mainly, to find out who else has already come up with an ingenious idea and buy their gizmo.

First we core the pears. This process is fairly awesome – we use an apple corer-peeler-dicer.  They end up in long coils. There’s no way to really explain it except through video. Matt took this with his left hand while working the machine with his right. They taught him that in culinary school.

We end up with a bowl of apples and a bowl of pears, and then it’s time for…The Dynacube! It looks as cool as its name would suggest.

It cubes stuff.

After that there’s an interlude which involves mixing, measuring, and other non-photogenic items.

And voila, a pot of pear, ready for jarring!

And speaking of gadgets, we just got a pretty amazing machine to assist in jar filling! We think this will help us stock up on local jars when they’re in season. We’ll keep you posted.