Pickled pears

I have wondered about pickled pears for a couple of years but either didn't have the time or wasn't sure about the taste.  I did have an hour spare and we did have a bumper crop of pears in the garden even though i am not convinced on the all that vinegar with the pears and how it will change the flavour of the suculate juicy fruit, if you don't try you wont know so i gave them a go.

  With my little farmer girl Sophie we went pear picking and gave them a good wash and peeled them

 Ingredients
450g granulated sugar
400ml cider vinegar
1tsp All spice berries
1tsp Cloves
1 Cinnamon stick broken in half
4 Pared stripes of lemon zest
2 Sprigs of rosemary
750g Rocha or Conference pears

In a large pan stir together all the ingredients except the rosemary and pears and bring to the boil slowly.

Add the 1/2 cut pears and simmer for 10 mins then add the rosemary and simmer for a further 5 mins transfer into sterilised jars seal and store in a cool dark place.

Well that seems simple enough and is what a variety of the recipes called for when i went researching this.
however i found that when i did the first batch the pears went brown and looked a bit soggy as they were half cut overall i thought they looked unattractive in the jar and i noticed that they par cooked as well, as the rosemary that ended up looking pretty sad for itself. So i thought seeing as i had 3 jars i would experiment i did one as per the general idea of how it should be done, soggy half cooked pear version.  One which whole pears not cooked in the liqueur but put straight into the jars and the rosemary as well then added the hot liqueur seeing as the fruit would have to sit in the jars with hot liqueur it should do a similar job with out frying the pears. The last jar i did a mix of whole and half pears as per the second jar version as i wonder what the consistency and vinegar saturation would be like on half cut pears.  Well i will now wait to let the pickling do its thing and taste and let you know later the results.  Anyway's the overall time spent on this was minimal and they do look pretty impressive sitting in the kitchen, so if they taste awful i could always keep them for decoration.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           











As an update to this pickling i found that over a few hours and more so over days the pickling mix shrunk the pears and although i jam packed the pears into the jars originally that i could not get any more in after 3 days i could in fact put 2 bottles of pears together to make 1 bottle.  Next time i may have the pears sitting aside in an airtight container for a few days before bottling to counteract this shrinkage.  Also when it came to the taste test of sitting the pears in the liqueur for 5 - 10 mins on the heat verses pears just sat in heated liqueur and then allowed to cool the later were far tastier than the their cooker counterparts.  The taste was amazing pure Christmas in a jar and we are defiantly going to get some suitably sticky blue cheese to go with these to enjoy over Christmas.