Canning Pears

My daughter loves pears, but when she sees them at the store and asks for them, they always seem to be about $1 per pear. That is outrageous to me, so she really gets maybe 3 a year and one of those is in her stocking on Christmas day! I decided to get a half bushel of pears from a local fruit stand, and bottle them myself.

My friend gave me her instructions on bottling pears and the process was quite easy, although time consuming. Here's what I did -

Washed each pear and peeled them, using a potato peeler. I cut them in to about 4 slices, just like an apple, cutting out the core. And yes, it was easier to peel the whole pear rather than cutting first and peeling after.

I would do about 8-10 pears at a time, so I kept the peeled slices in a bowl that had 2 cups water and 1tsp lemon juice to prevent them from browning while I was cutting the others.

When I thought I had enough pears to fill enough bottles to fill my canning pot, I would start stuffing jars with pears. I could fit about 3.5 pears per bottle, but it really depended on how the pears were cut and what the jar was shaped like.

In my 4 cup glass measuring cup, I would microwave 4 cups water and 1 cup sugar for about 2 minutes, then used a whisk to help the sugar completely dissolve. When my 7 jars were full of pears, I poured that sugar water mixture over the pears to fill the bottles.

Then, make sure to wipe the rim of the bottle clean so that you get a good seal, pop a heated, new lid on top, screw the ring on tight and put the bottle in the processing pot! Once the pot was full of its 7 bottles, I let it go for about 40 minutes, so that it was boiling at least 30 minutes.

I ended up with 26 bottles of pears, but one burst in the processing time. So, that's 25 lovely pints of pears into our food storage! Yeay!!!

*and yes, a few of them are pink. My husband's parents added red and green food coloring to their pears when he was growing up so he requested that I do that too. I think its awfully funny to add artificial coloring to what should be healthy food, but hey, that's what he wanted so he got a few.