I had access to a tree full of pears for a weekend. With the help of Meagen, we picked two large bags of pears of various ripeness – around 25kg I’d later come to know. I don’t actually like pears as a fruit, so I’d already panned to make perry from them. I’ve done this once before with pears from the same tree and the results were rather good.
I didn’t have the ability or time to process the pears immediately after picking, so they took a trip to an industrial freezer to be stored until I could use them. I was down with covid for a week or so after collecting the pears, and it has left me a bit fatigued. Carrying home 25kg of pears wasn’t going to happen. I took a trolley to bring them home and had to conduct a repair with scrap wood to shore up the sides before I could risk the journey home.
The pears were still too frozen to run through the scratter/crusher, so I left them overnight to thaw. Next day they were mostly thawed and ran through the scratter well. Giving a bucket full of green/brown pear pulp. The freezing an thawing had turned many of the pears mushy, which greatly helped the processing. Pears are full of pectin, which make the juice & perry cloudy, had I been reading the directions on the pectic enzyme I’d bought to reduce the pectin, I’d have added it directly to the pulp – I didn’t, so I didn’t.
The pulp went to the fruit press. The first batch squeezed well, but then came to a sudden stop – on checking the pulp it has formed a solid frozen cake. I turned this back into the bucket with the rest of the pulp and put it on the sun to thaw some more.
Pears are ~80% water by mass, so I was expecting about 20L of juice from 25kg of fruit. After pressing all the pulp, I had around 17L of juice. I definitely didn’t get 100% of the possible juice – due to not having the press mounted to a firm surface, I couldn’t get the pressure needed to extract all the juice.
Previously I’ve used an electric juicer to juice pears and apples. It works, but it loud and makes a lot of fine particles in the juice – you get almost a sludge which is had to ferment. The cheaper electric juicers and not really designed to run for several hours to process tens of kilos of fruit.
I added a heaped teaspoon of pectic enzyme to the juice and a few Campden tablets to knock down any wild yeast or bacteria, to give the yeast I want to use a clean slate to start growing.
The total volume of liquid was shy of the 20L I wanted, so I added some pretty bland apple juice to make up the difference. I’m hoping the primary flavour comes from the pears.
I’ll add the yeast tomorrow.