Serious Eats: Recipes
Cook the Book: Arugula, Pear and Goat Cheese Salad
This week's Cook the Book entry, How to Pick a Peach
- Where they're grown: Pear trees need more cold than most other fruit trees, they are susceptible to a wide variety of climatic ills. For this reason, between 90 and 95 percent of the total U.S. crop is grown in California, Washington, and Oregon....
- How to choose: Unlike, say, peaches, the varieties of pears are very different from one another. Bartletts, the most common variety, have a buttery texture and a mild, sweet flavor. Anjous are firmer and spicier. Seckels are tiny, with a rich taste. Boscs have russet skin and a graceful, slender neck; their flavor is mildly spicy. The Comice is the wide-bottomed queen of the pear family, with a heavenly floral fragrance, a buttery, slightly granular texture, and a flavor that is almost winey in its complexity. A pear is perfectly ripe and ready to eat when it is just beginning to soften on the neck, just below the stem. Except for Bartlett pears, pay no attention to the color—it changes only very slightly, if at all, during ripening. A perfectly ripe Comice pear, one of the true glories of the fruit world, will still show plenty of green. Bartletts will go from green to golden. They may look scuffed because of their delicate skin, but pay that no mind.
- How to store: Don't worry if the pears you buy in the grocery store aren't as ripe as you'd like. These are among the best fruits for ripening at home. Just leave them at room temperature until they begin to soften. The process can be speeded up by keeping them in a paper bag to trap the ethylene gas they naturally produce. This also promotes more even ripening. Once they're at the point you like, store them in the refrigerator, loosely wrapped in a plastic bag.
