North Star Orchard • Pear-y Tale

Press Page: Pear-y Tale

September 30th, 2001

Inquirer Magazine - "In Food" Section,
Sunday Insert of The Philadelphia Inquirer
Written by Rick Nichols

A Chester County orchard grows the round, Asian variety of the fruit.

In a certain early autumn light on the south edge of Chester County, off Church Road, just northwest of Avondale, it would appear that an orange grove has taken root.

The trees run row on row for five acres, mercifully replacing an abandoned motel-bar monstrosity, their leaves a waxy, dark green, the fruit round and rosy gold.

This is what the ripening Asian pears that orchardists Ike and Lisa Kerschner have planted look like toward harvest - this month’s bronze honey-sweet, drippingly juicy Hosui, and, through October, the crunchy and complex Yoinashi, which turns burnt orange and, at its perfect moment, offers subtle notes of butterscotch.

Asian pears have a rotund, apple like profile and an apple - some would say water chestnut - crispness. But they are decidedly pears (certainly not oranges), simply a rounder Asian model, not the more common pear-shaped Europeans, say, Bartlett or Comice.

They are different in other ways, too: The skin on the varieties that the Kerschners grow is a papery russet, more like a Bosc than an Anjou. And these Japanese-style pears are meant to stay crisp. They don’t need to soften on the windowsill.

They are used often in salads. They can be baked, sometimes in a mixture with one-third apples, in pies or tarts. But it’s hard to improve on eating them freshly sliced.

Asian pears aren’t total novelties in the produce bin. So I ask Ike Kerschner why he added this acreage to that of the nearby “home orchard” - North Star Orchard, the apple farm where he and Lisa grow niche apple varieties (Liberty, Gold Rush, Eclipse, green Reinette Simerenko, and Honey Crisp) on a steep hillside off Stargazers Road near Unionville.

His answer is plain enough. The Asian pears ($1.59 a pound) are a hedge when the price of apples tanks, as it periodically does. (His now go for 99 cents a pound.) Moreover, to be a small Asian-pear farmer confers a market advantage, not the usual vulnerability.

When Ike and Lisa tell farmstand customers, for instance, that the pears are tree-ripened, they can personally vouch for the claim.

One bright, hot afternoon last month, I tagged along as Ike and helper Rico Balzano fanned out at the Church Road spread, just over the hill from El Sombrero, the taqueria on
Route 41.

Ike inspected the ripening Hosui, chomping on several until he found one with honey-sweet flavor. Then he checked its looks - only a faint hint of green around the bottom - as a color guide for spot-picking a couple of rows.

That is how it went until a few sling baskets were full. Then Ike hand-sorted the pears one by one into two wooden crates - the perfect “1’s” for retail sale, the bird-pecked or blemished fruit for the pear-cider vat.

Finally, to protect the skin from tearing if the fruit tumbled during packing, each pear got its stiff stem snipped, the orchardist taking on the aspect of the pedicurist.

It is an intimate level of attention that the big California growers and Asian exporters can’t match. Nor can they vouch so personally for flavor and handling.

Which means that, in a certain autumn light, Ike and Lisa Kerschner have got them right were they want them.

The fruit is sold at the weekly farm markets in Kennett Square and West Chester, and in Philadelphia on Wednesdays, 3 to 7 p.m., 17th and South; Thursdays, 3 to 7 pm., Clark Park, 43d and Baltimore; and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Second and South.