I have been trying to expand my repertoire with respect to fruits. I'm a fairly adventurous eater, and I like to go to the grocery store and look for things I've never eaten before. Sometimes this ends up with excellent discoveries that I go back to again and again; other times I decide that I can do without future samples.
Sometimes, though, I forget to look through reasonably familiar items, like apples and pears, to see if my grocery store has started carrying new varieties. I've now had two extremely fortunate discoveries of amazingly delicious pears that I'd never tried before.
As a child, pears weren't my favorite fruit. My grandmother had several Bartlett trees, and it was a summer/fall tradition to pick them. Following that, of course, was a lot of eating of Bartlett pears. And...they aren't my favorite. I don't really like the texture, and I don't like the somewhat tannic flavor. These childhood experiences unfortunately fixed in my mind that "pears = Bartlett", which meant "pears = no thank you". (I only wonder if less than ideal food experiences, such as this one for me, is why children become picky about food. Very sad!)
Now, this position had already been shaken somewhat, since quite a while ago I discovered Bosc pears, which are everything that could be hoped for in a pear -- sweet and delicious as anything. But that just readjusted my position to "pears = no thank you, unless it's a Bosc".
Well, last fall I was shopping (buying Bosc pears) at Olympia Food Co-Op (fabulous place, if you've never shopped there), and I overheard two ladies talking about pears. One of them was rhapsodizing about Concorde pears. I'd never had them, but I perked my ears up, because she said she liked them better than Boscs! I resolved to try them when I saw them for sale.
My goodness -- I'm so glad I did! Concordes are amazing. They are tender, and the skin isn't very thick. They are sweet and juicy and delicious. I think I do like them even better than Boscs, which I never thought would happen. I also learned something else quite useful in my shopping: how to choose a ripe pear. Apparently, pears ripen from the inside out, so to see if a pear is ripe, you gently press on the flesh near the stem, and if it yields, it's ripe.
Anyway, yesterday I was shopping at PCC and saw a display with Comice pears. They are squat and almost round, and they weren't amazingly pretty or anything, but something prompted me to pick one up, turn it over, and smell the flower end. To my amazement, it had an amazingly sweet odor. It reminded me of quinces. (That was one of my experiments with trying something new; sadly, I now know that, despite how wonderful quinces smell, they don't taste good raw, even if you wait and wait and wait.) So then I wondered if Comice pears were some kind of hybrid with quinces. I put the pear back and continued my shopping, but then came back to it and picked one out (using the handy stem test.)
I just got finished devouring it. It was really amazing. Unlike some of what I've read, it wasn't that juicy, but maybe I ate it on the early side of its ripeness. Regardless, it was really delicious. So now I have three types of pears that I like! It's shaken my position that "pears = no thanks". Instead, I think I'm going to have to conclude "Bartlett = no thanks", but if it's some other type of pear, hand it over and I'll try it!
