Pear sparkling water, three ways
The unsweetened infusion, the syrup, and the ratio that makes the finished drink.
In season: Bartlett August to October. Bosc and Anjou October through April out of cold storage. Ripe is the whole game, so buy them hard and give them 3 to 5 days on the counter.
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Infused, unsweetened
Use
2 ripe Bartlett pears, cored and sliced thin, per 1 litre, plus 1 tablespoon lemon juice
Method
Add the lemon juice to the water before the fruit goes in, or the cut slices brown within ten minutes and the whole litre goes tan. Slice thin for surface area, cover with cold still water, refrigerate. Be honest with yourself about what you are getting: pear is one of the faintest infusions in this section. Done right it tastes like lightly sweet water with a pear finish, and the syrup below is where the flavour actually lives.
Time
8 hours minimum. Pear is slow and quiet, and at 4 hours you have almost nothing.
Sparkling
Still water for the steep, sparkling in the glass. An 8 hour steep would leave carbonated water completely dead by the time the flavour arrived.
Keeps
2 days refrigerated, with the fruit pulled at 12 hours. Past that the slices go mealy and the water picks up a slightly cooked smell.
The syrup
Ratio
1 cup chopped ripe pear : 1 cup sugar : 1 cup water
Method
Simmer 12 minutes until the pear turns translucent and slumps. Off the heat, drop in a 2 inch strip of lemon peel and steep 20 minutes. Strain through a sieve without pushing on the fruit.
Keeps
2 weeks refrigerated, 6 months frozen in an ice cube tray at 2 tablespoons per cube
Note
Roasting is the upgrade. Halve 4 pears, roast cut side down at 400F for 25 minutes until the edges caramelise, then use them in place of the raw fruit. The syrup comes out darker and tastes like somebody cooked it on purpose.
The finished soda
1 part syrup to 4 parts sparkling water over ice, with a squeeze of lemon
Pear carries almost no acid of its own, so without the lemon the glass reads as sugar water. Grate a little fresh ginger over the ice if you want it to have a spine.
The shrub version
1 cup chopped ripe pear with 1 cup sugar, sealed in a jar in the fridge for 48 hours, strained, then stirred into 1 cup white wine vinegar. Rest a week before drinking. Cider vinegar is the pairing everyone reaches for first and it lands closer to a salad dressing, so white wine vinegar is the safer call.
What doesn't work: A rock hard supermarket Bosc gives you nothing at all, no matter how long you steep it. Pear only has flavour once the flesh yields to thumb pressure at the neck, and until then you are steeping a potato. The other failure is skipping the lemon juice: cut pear oxidises fast, and an unprotected litre goes the colour of weak tea inside an hour.
Goes with: GingerThymeRosemaryCranberry