Canned Pears

There was a great sale on Bartlett pears earlier this week.  Bartletts are really good pears to can, as they hold their firmness well.  Pears really do well with a hot pack.  Raw pack pears can sometimes be a bit mushy, so hot packing, even though it takes more time, is totally worth it.

I made up a solution to prevent browning, by grinding up 3 Vitamin C tablets and adding the powder to 2 litres of water.

For peeling, I tried out my apple peeler but it really didn't do a very good job.  I ended up using my potato peeler and it worked like a charm.

After peeling, I cut each pear into quarters, then cored it with my paring knife.  Each quarter was then cut in half.

Once the bowl was full, I added the cut pears into a boiling sugar solution (2:1 ratio of water to sugar).  When doing this much fruit, I generally start with 2 litres of water and 4 cups of sugar.  I ended up having to add 1 litre of water and 2 cups of sugar about 2/3 of the way through the pears.

Once I added the pears to the boiling sugar solution, I had to bring them back up to boil.  Then I boiled them for 2 more minutes.

The pears were packed tightly into hot jars and topped with the sugar syrup.

I processed the pears in a boiling water bath for 30 minutes for 1-litre jars and 25 minutes for 500-ml jars.  I had to add 5 minutes to my processing time because I'm at elevation.  So, if you do not have to adjust for elevation, the processing times would be 25 minutes for 1-litre jars and 20 minutes for 500-ml jars.

Forty pounds of pears resulted in 14 1-litre jars and 2 500-ml jars.  I cut up the pears into smaller pieces for the smaller jars.

The peels, cores, anti-browning water, and leftover sugar solution will be made into Pear Syrup in the next couple of days.