White Wine Poached Pears

December 1st, 2009
330

whitewinepoachedpears

I could feel a sudden change of weather. We have had  kind of wet and stormy weather for the past 2 weeks or so? It rained again yesterday, which was horrible. Not only was the rain that made me feel miserable but the continuous strong gust of wind that was powerful enough to break lots of umbrellas out there! We no longer have double digits of temperature. I am not optimistic about the weather, it is unsettled, the temperature will continue to drop to 2 °C or 1°C, then to below 0°C. However, I could already feel the taste of Christmas. The reds and the greens, lights, Christmas decorations, presents, food, wine, and perhaps snow?

Pears are abundant at the moment. I like the idea of serving poached fruits as dessert. The summer that has passed, I made Peach Melba served with Vanilla ice cream. Since then, I started to pay more attention to desserts that are using the method of poaching. White wine poached pear is just another variation of poached pears desserts. The other one is using red wine, which is as good. I made white wine poached pears yesterday and I thought it was perfect for winner nights in December. It was so good that I had 2 (Ooops!). I don’t know it was because of the weather that made me feel that I needed to eat something like this to warm my body instead of having other kind of desserts after dinner.

Any kind of pears can be used in this recipe. The flavour is so good even if the ingredients are mainly made up of sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. I love cinnamon, the smell of cinnamon is just so special that I don’t only use them in dessert but in cooking main dishes too, especially stew. Good thing about poached pears is that you can make extras and refrigerate them, covered in the thicken poaching liquid in a deep glass dish for several days. They taste even better after!

By the way, we are only 2 days away before the giveaways of Dorset Cereals ends! If you haven’t left a comment to enter the lucky draw, please do so now by clicking on this link.

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whitewinepoachedpears

White Wine Poached Pears

Ingredients:

75g soft light brown sugar
365ml white dessert wine
2 cinnamon sticks
1 vanilla pod
6 ripe pears, peeled and cored

Directions:

1. Place the sugar, dessert wine, cinnamon sticks and vanilla pod in a pot and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the pears into the pot, turning gently to coat with cooking liquid and simmer for 20 minutes or until the pears are soft but not mushy.

2. Strain the pears and let them cool. Remove cinnamon sticks and the vanilla pod.

3. Return the cooking liquid to the saucepan and reduce in volume by simmering.

4. To serve, place the pears in the middle of individual plates and spoon over the reduced cooking liquid.