Lyon & Burgundy · Dessert
Poires à la Beaujolaise
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, a warm current of chile, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 6 firm pears, about 1.1 kg
- 750 ml Beaujolais, a young Gamay
- 180 g caster sugar
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 strip orange zest
- 4 black peppercorns
- 1 clove
- 30 ml crème de cassis
- 1 lemon, halved
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
The words inside
Gamay (Beaujolais)Poach, Simmer, Boil
Allergen screen
Found: alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Peel the pears, leaving the stalks on, and rub them all over with the cut lemon so they do not brown before they go into the pan.
- Bring the wine, sugar, cinnamon, zest, peppercorns and clove to a simmer and stir until no grain of sugar is left on the base; undissolved sugar scorches there and turns the syrup bitter.
- Lower the pears in on their sides, cover with a paper cartouche and a small plate to keep them under the surface, and poach at a bare shiver, turning once, until a skewer meets only slight resistance at the core, 20 to 35 min according to ripeness. 35 min
- Cool the pears in the syrup, then chill them in it overnight; the colour keeps travelling inward as they sit.
- Lift the pears out, boil the syrup with the cassis until glossy and just coating a spoon, cool it and pour it back over them.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Moscato d’Asti
- Also Right
- Late-harvest Riesling
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling elderflower
Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.
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