1,2,3 Step Dessert

Baking isn’t difficult. Like a musical instrument, getting good, it only takes time and practice to become a successful practitioner of the sweet arts. Books, visual mediums like TeeVee can help instruct and cut down own practice. The hard part is time, which is pretty easy to waste; making time is a completely different matter. The pear tart that we will be discussing this week can be done in bits and pieces. 20 minutes here and there stretched out over 7 days will get you to the same place as clearing the calendar to have a few hours to bake a Thanksgiving dessert.

There are three components to a pear tart. Poached pears, pastry cream and tart pastry – The best place to start is with the poached pears. For all the promise/threat of the better living that can be achieved through chemicals; it ends up that salt and sugar are still 2 of the best preservatives available. While a home cook doesn’t have Sodium bisulfite or Neohesperidin dihydrochalcone sitting on the shelf, they do have access to table salt and sugar.

Sugar in particular is a near miracle in the kitchen. Sugar is hygroscopic, it draws moisture from the environment – it will draw water from the air. This keeps your cookies moist for days. Or in a solution of 45-55% sugar, the cells inside meat, fruit or veg collapse from lack of water – giving microbes little room to establish themselves and grow.

2 Quarts Water
2 Cups Sugar
2 cinnamon sticks (1 heaping Tablespoon of ground)
½ teaspoon salt
1 lemon cut in half
Optional – 1 T vanilla extract or ½ a vanilla bean split in half.

Combine ingredients in a 4 Qt pan and bring to 165-180 degrees.

Peel 4 to 6 pears. For wine-poached pears, the pears would be cored, left whole and the stem left in tact. Here, the pears can be cut into ½ inch slices or cut into halves*. The slices make a nice presentation. The halves designate portions. Your call…

Once the pears are peeled and sliced to a proper consistency, they can be placed in the poaching liquid and cooked until they can not only be poked with a tip or a paring knife but the knife comes out easily. This will take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes depending on the softness of the pear and the exact temp of the poaching liquid. Sorry I can’t be more specific

Place pears in a clean container. Let poaching liquid come to room temp, strain and pour over pears. If properly stored (fridge temp, clean container), this can be done up two weeks in advance. Don’t believe me – fine this can be done a week in advance.

*The halves aren’t literally split down the middle. In this instance, a half is cut from the top to the bottom, about a half-inch off the core – the fruit still retains its pyriform figure but saves time on coring and trying to find uniformly sized pears.