Making Pear Sauce

It seems as though all my recent posts have to do with canning. That is because most of our food from the garden this year all came ready at the same time. I thought I was almost done with canning and then our neighbor said we are welcome to his pear tree because he does not use the fruit. We went and picked one box and let them ripen. We then made this pear sauce, which is so good, we went and shook the rest of the tree and now we have one more full box and one 5 gallon pail. They take a couple weeks to ripen so I will have a small canning break now. :0) This is our first box of pears. You can see they are still very green.

Once they turned yellow I cut them up into quarters...

and boiled them until soft.

I have this handy attachment for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer that peels, cores and seeds the fruit. One bucket collects the pear sauce and one catches the "garbage".

I added about 1 1/2 cups sugar per pail of sauce. You could make it without sugar and that is good too. It is delicious! Here are our first few jars of sauce..

Pressure can the sauce for 10 minutes at 5 pounds of pressure.

*Note: You can substitute pear sauce for pumpkin, applesauce or zucchini in your recipes. You can also add it to jello or put it on muffins/breads. Or just enjoy it as sauce right from the jar!