Pear Syrup from Poached Pears – A Syrup Never tasted So Good

This isn’t so much a posting about a recipe because urmmm there’s no recipe but it’s about a Kitchen Accidental that turned into my favourite syrup.  I’m not a syrup fan, golden syrup to me is for pouring into recipes and if I had to pick one would be maple syrup over freshly made waffles American style with crispy bacon.  (Had them done properly for the first time in the summer, now want waffle pan).  Pears are my favourite winter fruit and a syrup tasting of pears?  Well, that would have to be the one syrup waiting to be discovered by me? I think so.

During the Christmas holidays I poached some pears as I always do every year, along with the pears I prepare sliced oranges soaked in Grand Marnier, nothing unusual so far and I had some delicious vanilla poached pears to eat inbetween all the not so good for you cheesecake, Bikerboy’s tiramisu, mincepies…ok so now I have the extra 7 pounds I lost before the holidays but hey that’s why they invented Diet January?

I have posted the step-by-step guide of how to poach pears in the How To page I’ve started.  Roughly you make sugar syrup, I make mine less sweet than some, one volume of sugar to two volumes of water with a vanilla pod split down the middle, with a knife run it down the pod removing most of the seeds and adding it to the pan with the sugar and water and simmer for 10 minutes to infuse before adding the peeled whole pears.  And here you have some delicious vanilla tasting pears…

You can add other flavourings but I love my taste of pear with vanilla. Use any pears, I like using small conferences because they have hardly any core.

This is where it normally ends, some nice pears with a bit of the light syrup.  The thing is, you normally end up with quite more liquid than you use and in the past I did a terrible thing and poured it down the sink.  I can’t bring myself to think of all the pear syrups I could have had.   Not sure what came over me but this time I boiled it down by half of its volume and ended up with the syrup you see.

It has made me look forward to my morning porridge as never before.

It  has the most delicious pear vanilla flavour and if you like things that taste of pears then go and poach some.  Just so you have this sublime syrup in the next few weeks to pour over porridge in the morning, ice-cream, pancakes, rice pudding, pear tarts, waffles, with a poached pear and chocolate sauce, and now as I’m writing I pause, brain ticking away thinking of other possibilities, pear flavoured ice-cream, mixed in chocolate pudding, cheesecake.  I may have the workings here of a few recipes.  See how it’s a terrible thing for me when I find something I really like, a cooking frenzy begins, it’s a terrible curse on my waistline.

Pear Syrup over cookiedough ice-cream

I used the pear syrup to brush over the pears in this pear tart, recipe here enhancing the pear taste, makes me feel very Blumenthal!

Rosehip Syrup and the Very Trendy Foraging Movement

In the interest of trying something new, I can never resist.  Especially if it’s something on my door step as it was the case of rosehips that I found on the way to the large woods near my house.  I had found an article can’t for the life of me remember which magazine it was mentioning different things you could do with wild foods. It’s very fashionable at the moment to be making meals out of wild foods, eating wild foods in restaurants, I thought I would join the gang with a little hesitation. I’ve also read articles that taking away wild foods from the wild animals is not the best course of action, nor disturbing wild habitats but the rosehip bush I had my eye on was on the public side of a garden gate.  I don’t have much use for sloe gin and such like but rosehip syrup interested me if only to use in baking or the occasional pancake.

I started as usual with my overwhelming excitement on the prospect of discovering something new (new to me that is), free and tasting of amber nectar.  And just how many browny points could I award myself making something delicious from what everyone else walks past?  I’m on to a winner here, for sure.  OK, so first looking up recipes that start out with 1 kilo, over 2 pounds of rosehips did dent a sparkle off my enthusiasm, and if you ever had to pick tiny little buds off a thorny very prickly bush that dug into your coat, trousers, hair and pricked your finger I think it would dent your excitement too.  After having only just about picked enough to cut the recipe by half, because I wasn’t prepare to carry a ladder all the way from the bottom of my garden up the hill through narrow pathway to then put it up against a large bush with some very thin branches, not to mention it wouldn’t hold my weight, it would be like seeing a cow leaning against very long grass.  I decided to best leave the ones at the top!  Why is it the fruits you can’t reach are the nicest looking ones?  Plus by this time I had gone to collect the rosehips twice since getting home and weighing the first batch I gave out a little huff, it containing only 200 grams, 7 oz!

Came home with my pound’s worth and had to be content with that.  I followed this recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as anyone who would know about foraging recipes it would be him.  The recipe is simple enough but you have to boil the chopped rosehips, let it infuse, strain, re-boil the hips again, infuse, strain again, mix the two liquids, boil down to syrup, by which time, along with the scratches from the rosehip bushes I was doubting I would be making this again, unless of course it was the white truffle of the syrup world.  It didn’t help that I then had a large piece of muslin cloth stained and needed washing separately, in a household of five the word washing something separate conjures up the words, ‘not good, not happy’.

Here is the syrup on the left hand side darker syrup, sitting next to the pear syrup on the right.  Taste wise difficult to describe any distinguishing characteristics of rosehip syrup, it has a sourness, a tang but nothing to say it’s made from rosehips, I was expecting something more fragrant but the overall flavour you have is the sweetness of the sugar.  On Hugh’s recipe it states it’s full of vitamin C but unless I had no access to fruit it’s more attractive eating a kiwi and save myself the pricks.   I’ve already found my Free syrup from the byproduct of poaching pears, and this is how it makes me feel .  Best leave the foraging for those who love it, eh?

Rosehip Syrup on the left and Pear Syrup on the right