Poaching

When I travel, I tend to do it on the cheap. As a result I am pretty familiar with the street foods and grocery chain foods of many countries. Now that I've "settled" all those fancy continental equipment intensive dishes mock me with their luscious simplicity (did I contradict myself there?) from the satin pages of my (many) cookbooks.

The other day I walked to the local Co-Op to buy milk and some cookies for Stacey. As I passed through the veggie section a display of Bosc pears caught my eye. I vowed then and there to master the intimidating Poached Pear.

First I googled poached pears. Hundreds of wonderful pictures assailed me, so I stopped for an hour to admire them all. Well, the first few hundred. I looked at some recipes as well, and it seemed pretty simple. All the recipes made it seem as if making this show stopper of a dish (to me) would only take 18.345 minutes.

Because I liked the color of the really red poached pears, I decided to use red wine.

Here is where I started...a bottle of screw-top Malbec/Shiraz blend that a guest brought us and four firm Australian Bosc pears.

Then I went to our prodigious spice shelf to look for additional flavourings. Perusing the spices and making a blend in my head is my favourite part of cooking. I grabbed a bunch of likely looking things with a sort of a purple theme. 

I really like cooking with flowers because most people regard them as an ornament rather than a foodstuff. One of the flowers we have in abundance in our home is lavender. I even have a huge jug of disastrous lavender wine in the fridge. I decided that Lavender Poached Pears had a nice ring to it and grabbed the jar of purple even though warning bells were ringing in my head. I also got some orange peel and star anise. I looked for my vanilla bean but it has gone missing.

Armed with my flavours, I scratched out a recipe. Here it is as first penned:

4 Bosc Pears
3 cups red wine
1 tsp lavender flowers
1 tsp granulated orange peel
1 star crumbled star anise
1.5 cups sugar
add water to cover pears

I chose the pan/pot with the lowest volume but highest sides so that the pears would fit but the liquid would cover the pears. I put the pot on med-low (4) and added the wine, sugar, and spices. As it heated up I started to peel pears. I used a tupperware potato peeler (my wife came with a complete tupperware accessory set) but if the pears had been any softer than they were I would have had to use something sharper. It went pretty well, and I tried to collect any dripping juice into the pot. The wine mixture was getting warm so I lowered the pears into the pot with a slotted spoon...unusually prudent for me. I'm a pretty messy cook.

I managed to fit all four pears into the pot. I guess in my irrational mind I expected them to stand up, but they all fell on their sides. I poured water from the kettle to cover them, but they just floated. In my earlier poached pear research session I had seen a way to keep the pears covered in liquid using parchment paper (great stuff, I always keep some around). I cut a pan-sized donut of parchment and it kept the pears basted beautifully.
I waited until the pears were simmering lightly, and sat down to read a manga. I meant only to read a few pages, but I got really sucked into this incredibly formulaic story about a kid who can shape metal with his bare hands. Not a great read but it still ate time. Thankfully, those pears take a lot longer than just 18.xxx minutes to cook and when I finally finished reading Metallica Metalluca they were tender enough to push a small knife through but still firm enough to hold their shape. Way to go me!
I was a little disappointed with the colour...I was hoping for the deepest darkest red like the photos on the web. These were a delicate orange-purple. But a nice shade for something with lavender in the name!

























I left them on the plate to cool while I strained the liquid and started to reduce it to a nice syrup. I bumped it up to a soft boil and tasted it. Something was missing...fruitiness maybe. I looked around and saw a decrepit old grapefruit. I juiced it and added the juice to the mixture along with a splash of vanilla extract.

Then I stirred and stirred and stirred. Then I got bored and went back to the computer. I started reading about the capital of Mayotte, which is called Mamoudzou when I heard a hissing sound. I ran back to the stove to find syrupy mess boiling all over the unit and a burning sugary smoke cloud curling toward the skylight.

At least sugary messes clean up easily with boiling water.

I transferred to the other unit as the messy side was cooling. Then, drawing on my practice from making marmalades in the winter, I stirred the mixture while watching the temp on a candy thermometer. When it was approaching 250* F I whisked it off the stove and left it to cool.
Unfortunately, with such a vigorous boil a lot of the aromatics were vapourized. I grabbed a lemon and squeezed half of it into the syrup. Then I zested half of it for some decoration.  After cooling the syrup I coated one of the pears and spooned a bit onto a plate. Setting the pear on the syrup, I then added some lemon zest and the green leaf is a bit of Italian parsley for decoration.

Then I called my lovely wife to the table for a taste test. We snapped some more pictures of it before digging in.

The taste was better than I had hoped. At first it seemed as if the lavender would overwhelm all the other tastes, but after that boil the flowery resin was knocked back to a hint of floral zest. The harshness of the reduced wine worked well with the grapefruit, anise, and the lemon and zest worked well too.

It must have been good because we polished it off in about 90 seconds!

I regard this as a bit of a success, and I want to try poaching the pears in stout next. I also have a huge stock of apple ciders, quince wine, and plum wine. I'm gonna need more pears!

Or how about root beer or cola poached pears? I'd need to water it down...

The other three pears are now in the fridge living in the syrup. I'm going to see how they chill, and I may consider putting up (canning) some pears in this fashion so that I can enjoy them in the depths of winter. What shall I attempt next?