Not your usual pear sauce.

Zeke would eat a pear before any other fruit ... and Graham will eat almost any fruit.  The two of them have been having a pear a day since I picked up my lug last week!  It's a great snack and not so sweet as other fruit.  So, the pear sauce is a treat for Zeke, usually. 

Suzie's Spiced Pear Sauce - approved by Zeke, Graham and Angelina

My normal method of preservation is peeling, coring, and quartering the pears to preserve them in a light syrup.  This year, I wanted to try something new ... pear-sauce that resembles applesauce.  I found a couple recipes and proceeded to try one out.  At a point in the recipe, it said to use the 'old taste method' to adjust spice and sweetness.  I adjusted to the point of it being a different recipe, so I'll post it below. 

Suzie's Spiced Pear Sauce

Yield:  9.5 pints  (I only canned 8 pints because that's all my canner will hold in one batch.  The rest is for snacking!!)

5 quarts peeled, cored and diced pears*

2 quarts water**

1 1/2 cups sugar***
1 Tbl. lemon juice

1 Tbl. vanilla

1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. ground Cloves
1 Tbl. Stevia powder***

1.  Prepare the pears by peeling, coring and dicing/pureeing.  Put the prepared pears in a large stock pot or dutch oven.  Add the water, sugar, lemon juice, and stevia.

2.  Bring to a full, rolling boil, then reduce heat to create a low boil.

3. Add the vanilla and spices.  Continue cooking at a low boil for 15 minutes.  If you've chosen to dice the pears, boil until their texture is at your preference.  I used a potato masher to make the pear chunks smaller in my first batch.

4.  Hot water bath the pear sauce in pint jars for 12 minutes.

*For the first batch, the chunks of pear were about 1/2 inch cubes.  It left the sauce chunky.  I plan to puree the next batch to make it even more like applesauce.

**I used the full amount of water in my first batch.  I plan to cut back to 1.5 quarts water for a thicker sauce.

***At first, I used only 1 cup of sugar, but with the amount of spice the original recipe called for, it wasn't sweet enough for my taste.  The original spice combination tasted bitter to me, too.  So, I added the extra 1/2 cup sugar and added cinnamon.  The spice combination was much improved, but it was still not enough sweet.  So I added 1 Tbl. stevia, which is equivalent to 1 cup sugar in sweetness, to make the pear sauce taste the way I wanted.  If you want, you could cut the sugar to 1 cup and make up for the sweetness with extra stevia.  Use the taste test!