Rhapsody in Pear

These are not strictly Asian pears. The variety in front & at right is Golden Boy; the one in back is Shug. (I had to cut out a bad spot.)

Pears have always been pretty far down my list of fruits. Although in recent years I’ve come to appreciate a good pear with some tangy, nutty cheese, they have never been a fruit that I particularly relished eating. They’re blandly sweet and tending to mushy; I prefer fruits that have a pronounced tartness and sweetness, like strawberries, peaches, or apples.

Apparently the problem has been that I wasn’t eating really good pears, and if you’re buying them from the supermarket then neither are you. This summer I was introduced to the wonder of really truly delicious pears, thanks to our CSA share. One of the great things about eating locally is that it forces you out of your comfort zone, challenging your creativity to find recipes for produce you don’t regularly use (or perhaps that you have too much of!), and pushing your palate envelope by introducing you to foods you wouldn’t otherwise seek out, or varieties that aren’t available on a large scale because they don’t transport well.

High summer brought a harvest of pears at the CSA, and at first I regarded them without much enthusiasm. Organically grown fruit tends to have a dull skin with a lot of mottling, so it can look less than appetizing compared to the waxy, perfect fruit at the grocery store. The Asian pear, however, was a revelation. I had never eaten one before and I had no idea that there was any qualitative difference from the European pear. Asian pears (depending on the variety, of course) are assertively sweet, very juicy, and firmer than European pears. A chilled fruit, eaten straight from the fridge on one of our hot, humid summer afternoons, is a matchless treat. All three of us loved them, and though a few weeks ago we were getting 2.5 lbs a week, we ate them all and wished for more.

Gwen at Bee Natural says they grow so many pears because the trees do well here, as long as you get ones that have a low requirement for chill hours (because our winters don’t usually get very cold). You also need resistance to fireblight, and Asian pears do well on both counts. I plan on planting a couple of trees in our yard this fall.