The LA Blade’s intrepid Washington D.C.-based White House correspondent snarks his way through another delicious weekly recipe while dishing tea on other subjects
WASHINGTON – It’s peak pear season, my friends. Unfortunately, the bag of bartletts from your local Whole Foods or farmer’s market may nevertheless be disappointing.
In “Salt Fat Acid Heat” (which, by the way, is a must-read), chef and food writer Samin Nosrat includes the following passage from John McPhee’s 1966 book “Oranges.”
“Ground fruit – the orange that one can reach and pick from the ground – is not as sweet as fruit that grows high on the tree. Outside fruit is sweeter than inside fruit. Oranges grown on the south side of a tree are sweeter than oranges grown on the east or west side, and oranges grown on the north side are the least sweet of the lot.
“Beyond this, there are differentiations of quality inside a single orange. Individual segments vary from one another in their content of acid and sugar … When [orange pickers] eat an orange … they eat the [sweeter] blossom half and throw the rest of the orange away.”
“These kinds of natural variations mean you can’t know whether your orange is as acidic, ripe, or sweet as the one the recipe tester used in some distant kitchen,” Nosrat writes. Her message here is for home cooks to “taste as you go” and “trust your instincts” rather than follow a formula that may not work as well for you as it did for someone else.
My purpose, however, is to share a fantastic recipe for less-than-stellar pears. Because let’s be honest: in rare cases, the fruit can be delicious, but most of the time they suck. (In this respect they are unlike other produce, including oranges.)
So, pick up some pears while they’re in season, with the knowledge that even if they are hard, dry, mealy textured, and insipidly flavored, you can transform them into a delicious dessert with a poach in this saffron ginger syrup. Cooking is amazing, right?
Recipe from David Tanis, New York Times Cooking:
- Peel 6 Bartlett, D’Anjou, or Comice pears, slightly underripe, leaving stems intact
- In a small (~10-inch) skillet, add 2 cups dry white wine, 1 cup granulated sugar, ¼ teaspoon crumbled saffron, and 2 thick slices of fresh ginger. Stir and bring to a boil
- Add pears, reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook for about 20 minutes. Turn the pears occasionally if they are not fully submerged
- Allow to cool and refrigerate the pears with their syrup overnight or for up to several days
- Remove the fruit and simmer the syrup down to a thick glaze, about 15 minutes on medium-high heat*
- Pour over pears to serve with vanilla ice cream or crème fraiche
*Author’s note: I did not set a timer and was not watching closely, so my syrup reduced to the point that it essentially turned into a hard sticky caramel stuck to the bottom of my pan. So pay close attention!
Unlike with oranges, however, pears are often so bad they’re practically inedible. And good ones are rare.