Lonely bourbon? Pair with pear.

Finding myself with two lovely Bartlett pears, ripe and ready to roll, I hit the Google for some ideas on what to do with them. In particular, I thought they might be nice in a cocktail. Pear puree shaken with vodka sounded novel.

Well, that got derailed. I ended up aggregating some ideas I found, as is my way, and in the process, learning that pears taste really good with bourbon. Inspired by Make It Naked, I set out to create a pear vanilla simple syrup to pair with it.

I peeled, then quartered (or maybe eighthed?) the pears. My intention was to pop all of the fruit into the mix, but upon peeling them, the pears exploded with so much juice and fragrance, I was rendered helpless. A couple of the eighths went down right the hatch. Plenty of fruit left for the syrup, I figured.  My kitchen philosphy is one that eschews exact science. (Notice how little I bake.)

Beginning with the typical base for a simple syrup, I combined one part sugar and one part water in a pot and boiled it till the sugar dissolved. Next, I added the pear eighths and the peels. Some grated ginger. Then, the vanilla bean... Have you ever started a recipe just sure that you had a certain ingredient in your armory, only to get mid recipe, pot of stuff boiling on the stove, and find you don't actually have said ingredient? So it was with the vanilla bean. Luckily, we had just enough vanilla extract to approximate a vanilla bean (about a teaspoon of vanilla extract = one a half of a bean) so that went into the pot, too. Then I simmered the mixture for 10 minutes or so.

After that, the peels were removed, and the pear eighths were blended into the syrup with my immersion blender, and then the whole thing was sent through a strainer to smooth it out a bit more. The pear-vanilla simple syrup now complete, all that was left was to cool it down, so into the fridge it went, for about a half hour.

Old B-town, current staple for mixin'. Regan's Orange Bitters.

Meanwhile, I assembled the ingredients for the cocktail. Just bourbon and bitters. I used a two-to-one syrup-to-bourbon ratio, added a few dashes of bitters and shook it all together with a heaping helping of ice. Lots of ice seemed necessary as I couldn't quite wait for the syrup to cool all the way down.









What poured from the shaker was nothing less than a preview of autumn in liquid form. Spicy orange bitters conjure a gust of bracing November wind, swirling leaves, sweaters, boots... Slàinte!


I ended up with quite a lot of extra simple syrup. So I poured it into an ice cube tray for safekeeping. I'll throw one into a bourbon on the rocks, just to amp it up a bit, and a cube recently made its way into one of my husband's smoothies.

Handy little buggers to have around.