Still working my way through the mountain of pears. Yesterday and today I made pear jelly. I filled my large pan with all the damaged or soft pears, put a lid on, over a low heat, and left to slowely cook down for about an hour. After this I went in with my spud masher and really bashed the fruit mooosh around, then replaced the lid and gave it another 15 or so minutes. I ADDED NO WATER AT ALL!
The resulting pulp was passed through a jelly bag which I squeezed to get maximum juice and flavour. The resulting liquid was clear dark amber.
I had 4 pints of pure pear juice to which I warmed and added 4Ibs sugar and I boiled it and boiled it until it reached setting point. Bottled, sealed and left to cool.
Low and behold, 8 jars of pear syrup! So this evening I poured the syrup back into my pan, resterilised my jars and added the correct amount of powdered pectin to the liquid, brought to a rolling boil and cooked it for just 4 minutes. Now have 7 jars of beautifully set pear jelly. It is amazingly strong - I was very suprised. It is incredibly pear flavoured and sweet, but not sugar sweet - overripe pear sweet if you catch my drift.
Still have 4 trays full of wrapped pears in the garage and one of my vegetable trays in the bottom of my fridge full of pears!
Sounds gorgeous!
So what are your plans for the rest of the pear mountain? :D
Oh Emma thats sounds like my idea of heaven, pear jelly, I just love pears... I didnt get one pear from my pear tree and not even a partridge..... ;D
Sounds good Emma, glad to hear that the pectin did the trick :) - it's funny how much liquid is in pears, it really doesn't seem that way when you eat them fresh.
Well, mum has the first jar to try on her toast tomorrow. I can't afford to open a jar just yet as we have about 10 different varieties of jam in the fridge, and the peanut butter, marmite, nutella and golden syrup in the cupboard! I was amazed how much juice was produced Jen, more than apples have ever made!
As for the rest of the pears - I am hoping some store for Christmas as the rellies are coming to stay from Devon, and Grandad loves fresh fruit so it will be nice for mum to have a bowl full for him. I am eating 2 a day, every day, now I am wondering about chutney......
Spiced pear relish?
Basically, just covered cut pieces of pear with water and cooked softly about 15 mins then made up a syrup with sugar to equal the weight of the water left, and added 10% vinegar and 5g allspice per 1000g pear weight.
Cooked very slowly for a long time (several hours as I was doing other things and just gave it the occasional stir) until pears were dark pink.
Brilliant with very strong cheese.