Pear Bread

This wonderful bread made with sugar pears, unbleached all-purpose, whole wheat and rye flours, is based on Sandra Avital's (Le Pétrin) recipe for "Pain Rustique aux Poires".

The rye flours was given to us by my sister. How brilliant is she?

Sugar pears are tiny. But that doesn't mean their flavour is tiny!

The flesh is firm yet soft. And incredibly sweet and juicy. Everything that a pear should be. Because they are so tiny, four sugar pears were needed for the bread.

The dough is not so terribly sloppy as I was lead to believe. Until I added the drop of vanilla and masses of butter.

Adding really juicy diced pears put the dough into and directly up to the top of the "sloppiest dough ever" league. But determination and a dough scraper did the trick.

Here it is ready for proofing. I had to keep pushing the pear pieces down into the dough to make sure they didn't oxidize as the bread proofed.

Once the dough had doubled and was shaped and ready for baking, it was time to put on the pear decal. This was quite an adventure. Using rye flour helps to ensure that the pattern doesn't get absorbed. (The corn in the 3rd photo was for dinner that night. It was the worst "fresh" Ontario corn we've ever had! We're quite certain now that it had been picked days before.)

The stencil stuck quite badly to the first loaf and it seemed like there wasn't enough flour to make a difference. So I added more for the second loaf.

The reason for the sticking: I used some scrap paper to make the pear stencil (no wonder the paper was scrap! The music was printed backwards!!) The paper wanted to stick to the bread and any little details I artfully (cough) added ripped off when I removed the stencil (along with some of the dough).

Here is the bread just out of the oven.

This is the result of the first stencilling that I thought didn't have enough flour.

And this is the result of the second stencilling that seemed so well defined. Oh dear.

The crumb was lovely and soft.

It's clear that using a smooth pestle and mortar isn't the best way to grind flax seeds.

Pear bread makes GREAT toast! Especially slathered with butter and homemade apricot jam.

As part of her "Lunch Box Project" (lunchboxproject.blogspot.com/2010/08/pear-bread.html), Lisa Orgler was inpired to draw my pear bread. How cool is that?!