Dehydrating Pears

Dehydrating pears is pretty similar to dehydrating apples.  Prep was similar to what I did for the pear preserves, with a couple of exceptions:  I didn't dice them and I only peeled some.  I wanted to try them with skins on and skins off to see if there were any differences.  Obviously, leaving the skins on is easier.

The melon baller is an addition to my kitchen hardware since I cut up the pears for preserves.  It makes it a little easier to get out the hard tissue around the core, but I still use a knife to get out the strands leading up to the stem.  When quartering the pears, a knife works pretty well to cut out the core and seeds, also.  The bowl in the right sink in the picture is where I dunked them to keep them from browning, with much success (the bowl held water with ascorbic acid).

As you can see below, the presence of skins makes a major difference in how fast they dry down.  This was shot just a few hours after starting the dehydrator and running it at 135 degrees.  Those with skins are still fairly plump in the photo, while the peeled ones are shriveling fast.  How's the flavor and texture?

The verdict: I like them--with and without the skin (these are more Kieffers).  They are very gritty when dried, but the flavor is great.  I dried some Seckels a couple of years ago and these are almost as good.  Dehydrated Kieffers are a winner.  I'm still undecided about planting one, however...

Wild Muscadines

Muscadine grapes are a native variety that do well in the South.  The European-style grapes have plant disease issues when grown here.  There are a number of cultivars that produce very nice grapes (albeit all with seeds--no way around that).  Most or all state agricultural extension services in the southern US have pages devoted to muscadines, e.g., UGA.  Somewhat confusingly, the different states' sites offer conflicting information.  Ison's, a nursery that has developed and patented a large number of muscadine varieties, has a table that more or less lines up with the information available from the extension services (keeping in mind occasional disagreements--which may be related to how different varieties perform in different regions).

There are wild types growing...wild...everywhere in the South.  I have seldom seen any female vines with fruit on them, but when walking through the woods near the well recently, found one growing on an old fence.  The picture at the right was taken in early July.

I was wondering if I'd ever see any fruit off of the plant.  Muscadines are eaten by a variety of wildlife, and north Georgia also has been in a fairly severe drought since spring.  Most farmers in the area have no irrigation (with 50+" of rain per year, it's normally not needed), and I saw a number of fields where the corn crop was lost.  Wheat was not as heavily-impacted, though yields may have dropped, and soybeans got off to a very slow start but some rains arrived in August to keep things going--temporarily.  September has been mostly dry, as well.  The drought has caused a more or less total loss of my own black walnut crop this year; in April and May things were looking decent but all of the nuts dropped early.  Some hickories are dropping now but I haven't opened any up yet to see if they are developed.

I did get a harvest--one grape--off the vine pictured above.  When I looked in early September one was ripe with a couple of others still green.  The grape was tiny but the flavor was okay.  The skin was thick and fairly tart, but overall it wasn't bad.  I hope this plant continues to develop.  It will probably never amount to much because it's under a fairly dense oak canopy.  Still, it's a nice find.  Then again, I may have to cut it out.  If it grows substantially, it might pull down the old fence. The old fence isn't serving much functional purpose currently, but I don't want it to end up on the ground.

I see wild muscadines littering the trail where I run in August, both bronze and black, but they grow high in the trees, so the grapes usually split or at least get badly bruised in the fall to the ground: they are seldom in good / edible condition.

I have a trellis set up for muscadines--more domesticated varieties--but I haven't planted them yet.  I need to get my fencing set up for the vines when they are installed; I have a substantial deer population in the field where they will be going.  That's a project for the off season coming up.

Pear Preserves

Harvest season is starting to wind down a bit so I have some time to post.  I have a lot of material queued up, but it takes time and motivation to get it online--that and timeliness: a post on thinning peach trees probably wouldn't resonate much right now.

I got some Kieffer pears yesterday.  There are trees all over north Georgia that are overloaded with pears right now and they have an ever-increasing collection of drops on the ground. Most of these are probably Kieffers.  Many people apparently don't bother with them anymore; in the Atlanta exurbs, there are a lot of pear trees in what are now subdivision yards--the new occupants have no idea what to do with them and, since they didn't plant the tree, not much interest.  They might have tried gnawing on one at some point and quickly decided they were no good.  However, the people who planted the trees didn't waste time and effort.  If there were better fruit trees to plant, they would have done so.  The old rural farmhouses might be gone, but the trees endure.

I had a Kieffer tree myself (briefly).  It was long-neglected when I took ownership of the property and I did get a few pears the first year.  I tried to eat them fresh both before and after I let them sit at room temperature waiting futilely for them to ripen and soften to become like Bartletts.  I looked into doing pear preserves at the time but never got around to it.  The tree was a scaffold for a poison ivy vine the size of Godzilla, so I cut it down after a year or so and hauled it off to an inert landfill (I was worried about even burning it for firewood).  The poison ivy had more or less embedded itself in the tree over a period of years and couldn't be pulled out or cut off at ground level.  The tree had literally grown around it.

Kieffers are very hard.  They look like pears but do not assume Bartlett-like softness and coloring when they ripen.  My peck bag had a mix of green and almost-golden coloring, as the picture shows.  They are somewhat grittier than Bartletts and way more so than Seckels.  The skin is more noticeable than that of a Bartlett when eating fresh if unpeeled.  The pears at the right (any color) were sweet enough; I was pleasantly surprised when I cut one open and sampled it.  It was also very crunchy.

You can see videos and sites online that say you can briefly immerse pears in simmering water, then quench in cold water, and remove the skin easily.  I don't think that works with Kieffers, or if it does, there's more to it than just letting them bob in near-boiling water for up to a couple of minutes.  I soon gave up and resorted to a vegetable peeler.

That worked fine.  They peeled quickly.  I used the knife to cut off the top and bottom, then quarter them, cut out the core, then dice them.  I was surprised at how quickly it went:  I'm pretty slow at canning food prep, but I got eight cups of diced pear pieces in less than two hours.

This is a double batch, which various sites say is a bad idea when making preserves, jams, and jellies.  I have never had problems getting a doubled recipe to work, but at some point I might--either way, if I'm going to go through all the trouble to get everything set up then torn down and cleaned at the end, I want to do more than three pints.

I did not have much trouble with darkening; to each two cups of diced pears I added a tablespoon of lemon juice, stirring it around a little.  I then followed the standard directions.  The Sure-Jell package insert has a recipe, as does the website.  I did not add the butter--that wasn't on the package insert and it does not necessarily sound appetizing.  Before heating, I used a potato masher to bruise the pieces and liberate some juice, but they did not break down nearly as well as peaches or blueberries, to say the least.

I was a little worried that the nuggets wouldn't soften enough.  Crunchy preserves would be interesting, but they would also unprecedented in my canning experience.  No worries on that count; I actually ended up with slightly more than eight cups of pears, so also had slightly more than six pints of preserves: the remaining 0.2 pint after I'd gotten as many filled jars as I could I just put in the refrigerator.  It set up well when it cooled and the fruit chunks are tender.  The ones in the canner got even more heating, since they were processed for about 17 minutes.  They should be fine.

The consistency of the pears was thinner / runnier than I get with peaches when the mixture was heated.  As the pear pieces cooked down, they shrank quite a bit--one of the reasons that fresh-pack pears and apples usually don't turn out all that well, I suppose--and the overall viscosity became very fluid.  I mentioned above that I usually don't have trouble getting my preserves to set up, and that's true: I also don't usually do the frozen-plate test, but I did today just to be sure.  All was well.

The recipe is the standard two cups of sugar per pint, so is very sweet--but that's okay.  Given the amount of this I eat at any given time, I'm not worried about counting calories for this.  I tried some reduced sugar jam with the low-sugar pectin one time and didn't care for the consistency.

It's good stuff.  I'm not sure I want to go on a mission to meet people and ask them if I can harvest pears from their trees, but Kieffers have some promise.  I have two pear trees that are too young to bear: Magness and Seckel.  A third, Ayers, was unfenced and demolished by a randy buck last fall.  I will look to replace it this winter.

I've been thinking of another Ayers or a Warren... something that is good to eat fresh.  There are some who say the Kieffers can become soft eventually, and that even if not, they're fine crunchy.  I half-agree.  It's a bit more work to render a Kieffer ready to eat than it is to do the same with a Bartlett or Seckel (with the latter, it's just clean and start biting).  I'm going to try dehydrating some Kieffers with and without skin to see what happens.  Will I plant a Kieffer?  I don't know.  They are definitely low-maintenace and disease-resistant, thriving everywhere around me in conditions of long-term utter neglect.  Maybe.  I'll think about it after seeing how the dehydrating works out.