Pear Pie Crumble
I’m totally a sucker for pears. When they are at their peak of ripeness, there’s nothing like them. I grew up with my Mom canning pears, and can still remember how sweet the kitchen would smell when she’d spend the afternoon carefully peeling the skin off each pear, slicing them out of the core, cooking them on the stove, and carefully filling up each jar with steaming pears. She’d always have them all lined up on the counter top. Their soft ivory color of the pears in the jars looked so beautiful together. I’d always get so excited when dinner came around and my Mom would ask me to go in the basement to grab a jar of pears for my family to share. She always added a little extra sugar to the jar while canning, so the juice the pears were canned in turned into an incredibly delicious syrup. My siblings and I would often fight over who gets to steal a taste of it before Mom noticed what we were up to.
The recipe really has three parts to it – the crust (which is my Perfect Pie Crust recipe – if you haven’t made it you, you will LOVE everything about it), the filling, and the crumble. The crust has only 5 ingredients and comes together super fast. I pre-baked my crust just to make sure everything got baked through on the bottom. The crumble on top cooks much faster than the crust on the bottom, so a little pre-bake went a long way.
When choosing your pears for this pie crumble, I would stick with pears on the more ripe side. Not mushy ripe, but not hard either. Picky, I know, but it will greatly influence the overall texture of the filling. So set yourself up for success by choosing a pear that would be perfect enough for you to bite right into at that moment! Slowly stir in the dry ingredients and pour everything into the pre-baked pie crust.
The crumble has a little bit of oat action. I used old fashioned oats and quick oats to give the crumble a bit more texture. Toasting the oats would have been a really good idea – wished I would have done it! Why do I just think of these things now!? OH well. When you make this, toast up those oats and let me know how it goes, deal? The crumble is one quick spin in the mixer and right onto the pie.
Lastly, I couldn’t resist. I grabbed a carton of my favorite vanilla bean ice cream, dolloped a scoop on top, and drizzled some of my homemade salted caramel right on top. We polished this off in two days… between my husband and I. Good thing my half marathon training is in full swing, eh? Eek! Totally worth every sweet bite. The texture in this is incredible! You have the sweet soft filling, with the classic gorgeous pie crust buttery flakiness underneath, and then that crumble, OH that crumble, to take it home. THIS my friends, officially marked the beginning of fall for my taste buds.