Cooking with fresh pears...Question

[Capucine]

Do ya'll cook with fresh pears? I never have and neither did my Mother. She pretty much only made pear salad...which I still love. Oh, and she made pear perserves, which I never was overly excited about...so maybe that answers my question. But here it is anyway. I've been trying to use up 3 bottles of maple syrup I found in my refrigerator last week. So I found this recipe on the SL website for pear cobbler. There is maple syrup in the juice that the pears are cooked in. The crust has ginger and toasted almonds. Sounds good, huh? So I made it last night. I cooked it the direction time and the pears didn't cook. Maybe I didn't have them sliced thin enough. The crust and the juice were really good though. LOL!! So I decided to cover it with aluminum foil today and cook it longer. So I did. So now the pears are cooked. But, they just have very little flavor. Are there certain kinds of pears that are sweeter than others? I will say that the recipe called for Anjou pears....which are supposedly very common but my grocery store didn't have them. So I bought what they had....which were probably Bartlett, but I don't really remember.

So, what are your experiences with pears?

[Clover]

I've never had a problem with pears not cooking, and if you used Bartlett I'd think the problem would more likely be that they cooked to mush. I wonder if the cause was the cooking time or your oven temperature. The cooking time would vary depending on the type of pear and how ripe it was, so you might have to cook them longer than the recipe said. I tend to use Bosc, since I've had a lot of tasteless Anjou pears in my life, and test them to see when they're done. As far as the flavor goes, it could be that these particular pears didn't have much flavor when they were raw, but it could also be that the maple syrup just overpowered them. Pears have a rather delicate flavor, while maple syrup is quite assertive. (Actually, pear and ginger and almond go so well together that maple seems extraneous to me, but I realize the whole point was to use up your maple syrup.)

[Capucine]

I don't think the maple syrup overpowered the pear flavor. It only called for 1/4 cup for a 2 quart pie. The pears just don't have any flavor. The more I think about it, the more I think this is not uncommon with pears. Someone on another board suggested that pears that just come from the grocery store aren't ripe yet. That's making the most sense to me right now.

[mbrogier]

I was going to say they weren't ripe yet. I happen to like not ripe anjou pears. (reminds me of granny smith apples) I love cooking with pears because I am allergic to apples. (I LOVE apples) I just bought a huge bag of bosc pears.
http://www.marthastewart.com/page.jhtml?type=content&id=channel186168&layout=edf&subStyleType=inseason&catid=cat17930
A lot of the recipes for cooked pears call for these--especially poached pears.

My grandparents had a Bartlett pear tree in their back yard. I'm not that fond of Bartletts. I think they're mushy when ripe and a little bit grainy. (like red delicous apples)

I've even been eating pears with caramel dip. I miss my caramel apples.

[Capucine]

Maybe I'll try this recipe again and let the pears ripen at home a few days before using them. Maybe. I'm not good about trying a recipe twice though.

I love apples. I'd hate to have an allergy to them. :(