Canning Pears

Remember September? Where did the rest of that month?

I had a birthday, it turned from summer to fall, school started, I kept bringing home buckets of produce from the Urban Farm, and I made multiple trips to the store to buy more canning jars. That sums up how the last two or three weeks have been for me.

According to some local farmers, it has been a bad year for pears. There wasn’t a lot of fruit on the trees and the quality of the fruit was not so great. There were some at the Urban Farm though, so I spent a monring collecting fallen fruit. They were aesthetically challenged, but fine for canning.

You could make all sorts of canning concoctions from pears: pear sauce, preserves, jam, chutney, etc. We decided to simply can them halved in syrup for desserts this winter.

To do this, I made a simple light syrup of two cups sugar to every five cups of water and warm it over the stove. I peeled, halved and cored the pears gently. Then they went into the stock pot with enough syrup to cover them. Once they were warmed, I packed them into pint jars and processed them in a hot water bath canner for twenty minutes.

It felt like a somewhat meager haul, as we only ended up with about four or six pints, but it’s better than nothing. I’m looking forward to canning apples to make up for the weak pear harvest and get our cupboard stocked to the brim before the first frost!