It’s traditionally harvested in mid-December and stored for at least one month-if not several-before eating to develop its best flavor. In France, one variety, Passe Crassane, is known as a winter pear. Yet pears have been bred for centuries to fill that critical gap between harvest and springtime, when most people had to settle for dried fruit-or no fruit at all. It’s counterintuitive, especially for those of us who have been trained to believe that tree-ripened anything is the only way to go. Leave them on the tree too long, and they’re more likely to pick up that odd grittiness, and they can be more prone to rot rather than sweeten. That’s because pears are best when they’re harvested when still quite firm and allowed to ripen off the tree. Pears are particularly well suited to travel, and unlike many other crops, we don’t have to sacrifice flavor for shippability. Once they arrived in the Northwest, they discovered with pleasure that the mild climate was just right for orchard fruits, and soon orchards in the Willamette Valley and throughout the Columbia Gorge were supplying fruit that filled freight trains destined for hungry markets back home. Early settlers tucked pear whips (little single-branch seedlings) into the backs of their covered wagons before setting out on the Oregon Trail. This region has also been growing pears for a very long time. This year, we’ll ship about 792 million pounds of pears to buyers around the world, where they’ll appear on shelves from your local grocer all the way to China. Oregon produces more pears by weight than any other fruit. Oregon and Washington produce 84% of the nation's fresh pear crop. Except there’s no reason pears need to be saved for special occasions, especially not here in the Northwest, where the vast majority of the nation’s pears are grown. If apples are an everyday, toss-one-in-the-lunchbox kind of fruit, a pear says “party”-sophisticated, delicate, seductive, with a graceful silhouette and musky, perfumed flavor. “I live in my grandma’s house and I look right at Mt. Has he ever regretted trading fashion for farming? “I think I’m in God’s country,” he says. Today, Gordy is one of the leading pear growers in Hood River, with a 160-acre orchard planted in seven different varieties. “And the second call was to my father, saying ‘I’m coming back to the farm.’” “The next morning, I got up, called my boss, and quit,” says Gordy. Gordy was coming back from his monthly sales trip to Hawaii, and on the plane, he realized his life needed a change. “When you’re young, you want to be where the action is, and it most definitely was not in Hood River on a farm,” laughs Gordy.īut after 26 years of long workdays and tons of travel, that all changed. After business school at OSU, he launched a career as a buyer in the fashion industry, working for companies like Nordstrom and Meier & Frank and covering territory all over the West Coast. But Gordy never thought he’d become an orchardist-and, for a while, he wasn’t. Gordy Sato’s family has been growing pears in the Hood River valley for more than 100 years.
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