Canning Pears

I canned some of the Kieffers (as part of my evaluation process to determine if I want to get a tree this winter to plant to go along with the Magness and Seckel).  The procedure I followed was pretty much the same as for peaches except that I did peel them.

It turns out I may not have needed to do that.  Jill Winger notes on her Prairie Homestead blog that she does not peel them and gets good results.  Contrary to the advice of the NCHFP, I raw-packed, as Jill did (though I did use a light 1:3 syrup, contrary to Jill's approach of using plain water).  It's not a safety issue; the NCHFP just says that raw pack yields poor quality.  The NCHFP recommended 25 min. for hot-packed quarts; the recommendation for raw- vs. hot-pack peaches is +5 min., so that's what I did, adjusting another +5 min. for altitude.

I timed it.  I spent about two minutes per pear, nearly half of which was peeling.  Peeling was also pretty messy, spending a spray of peach juice droplets over the immediate area.  I quartered them rather than leave them as halves, because the stem fibers and cores were easier to remove as quarters.  I just cut both of those parts out with a knife, then used the melon ball to dig out any remaining parts of the core (I'll see later if I was successful, but so far I seem to have managed pretty well with the pears I dehydrated).

As the photo shows, they resist browning well after a dunk in an ascorbic acid solution.  The contents of the bowl above had been out of the water for about an hour when the picture was taken.

Time start to finish for about 10.5 pounds, which yielded 5 quarts, 1 pint was about 3 hours, which is pretty standard.  It works out to about two pounds per quart, which is fairly typical (albeit more than with apricots, which are apparently not as dense). Even though packed cold/raw, they didn't shrink down much after processing.