Hi I am Chef Keith Snow. Welcome to my kitchen. I want to show you how to make Poached pears. It is great dessert, makes a fancy presentation, great for your next dinner party. Let’s get right into it.
These are organic bosc pears, and for my money, these are the best to use for this dessert. One thing to know, buy pears that are firmer, they are not quite ready to eat. They are not ripe enough to eat but that is what you want for this dish. So, look for firm ones and make sure your stems are intact. Okay, and these are organic. And we are going to leave those stems on because they make a pretty presentation at the end. So, the first thing we want to do is cut off the end here, so this will stand up in our path. So, we are going to do our bests to make a nice flat bottom. So, now it will stand up like that and that’s how they will be on the plate as well. So, now I have made poached pears before where you harvest eating people and I have left this skins on, you certainly could do that but this time, we are going to want to take them off so, we get more of a beautiful color from the wine.
So, simply take a peeler and again, be careful not to knock that off and peel this all down. And that is it. Peeled, my pears, this are slippery sucker so you got to be careful. Alright, let us do a little clean up. So this is how our pears will be and now let’s take them, we are going to put them down into our nice little, happens to be a French cast iron pot and pot. And then we are going to add some flavorings. First, water, three cups, and you do not hold on to this measurement so much because what you want is to be about half way or so, three quarters up the pear. Then I have got one cup of a very high quality red wine and that is going to lend color and flavor. A Baileys, you might be thinking of a Baileys, trust me, put in the Baileys. And about five cloves, I mean the last thing is sugar, only a one quarter cup. Do not go crazy with the sugar. You do not need a lot. Just put that around there like that.
Now, this are going to simmer or poach in this liquid until you can take your knife and pierce them in their firm but still tender at the same time if you can imagine it. You do not want them to fall apart. You cook them too long, they will not stand up. So, they need to have a little tools to them. So, we are going to take this, put them on our stove in the back and let them poach.
Okay, our poached pears have done their poaching and one of the things I want you to take note of is that beautiful color and I do not like to completely submerged the pears because then, there would be red the whole way up. This way, you got a gorgeous contrast from the red wine in there. And I want to show you by taking this knife, you can see that I can put the knife in there but the pear is still holding its shape. If you cook it for too long, unfortunately, you will never be able to get that out of the pot. I just used a pair of thongs to get it out because it is soft, it will fall apart.
Another thing that I did is over hear when the pears were done, I was letting them cool. I reduce the cooking liquid. I took out that cloves and the Baileys, and I reduce this down and then I thickened it up with slurry cornstarch. Simply equal parts, corn starch in water mix together. You turn the heat down and you whisk it in, and it will thicken up and then you will be left with this gorgeous little sauce. This is totally a peeling You do not have to do it but I hate to peel out that liquid. So, let’s plate our dish up and finish it.
You can see we got a gorgeous plate. We are going to take some of this reduced red wine sauce here. And we will just going to put a little drizzle around the plate, just like that.
And now we have some nice walnuts and we will just put a few pieces of those walnuts around, sort of in the sauce. This is optional too, but I think it looks real nice. And then here is a gorgeous homemade caramel sauce and this is very simple to do, there should be a video on the website that shows you simply just, sugar, water, a little heavy cream, littl
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