it's all going pear shaped
If we’re lucky, we’ll start to see pears in our seasonal fruit bags / boxes (or ready for picking in our back gardens!) from the end of August all the way through to the beginning of February.
Pears come from the same family as apples but when ripe usually have much softer flesh than ripe apples. Unlike other fruits, pears ripened on the tree are less delicious and smooth than pears that are harvested and finish their ripening off the branch. If they are left to ripen on the branch, pears develop a particularly gritty, woody texture.
One of the most interesting things about pears is, I think, that they cause the fewest allergic reactions in people of all the fruits. Which has lead many people (although not vegetarians, I’m afraid) to live on a “lamb and pears” diet for a short while whilst they reintroduce foods they suspect they may be allergic to, as lamb is also very rarely associated with allergic reactions.
Read on to find out more about buying, storing, preparing and cooking pears, and (more importantly!) to drool over our latest addition to the VBR recipes database – “Particularly Piggy Pear Pie”!
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