“There is an old saying that one must sit up at night to eat a pear—meaning that it is essential, but tricky, to eat a pear at precisely its ripest moment.”—Alan Davidson and Charlotte Knox, Fruit: A Connoisseur’s Guide and Cookbook (Mitchell Beazley Publishers, 1991).

“Getting a perfect pear from farm to table is a risky and complicated business…. First the pear must be picked from the tree when it is mature but not fully ripe. It must experience a period of cool storage, the optimal length of which varies according to the variety. Then it must be brought out to room temperature to finish ripening.” Alice Waters, Chez Panisse Fruit (HarperCollins, 2002). Phew! You’d think tasting a ripe pear was close to impossible based on these type-A expectations. Luckily, Laurie Colwin had a completely different way of viewing pears and their virtues.

“In the world of fruit, pears are a cook’s greatest ally. Imagine, a fruit that ripens off the tree: Bought hard as a rock and kept on the counter, it becomes juicy, smooth, and perfect in just a few days. Like the quince, the pear perfumes a room. Unlike the quince, which is tricky to cook, the pear cooks like a dream.”

As Alice Waters tells us in Chez Panisse Fruit, farmers must know the exact moment to harvest pears. Carl Rosato of Woodleaf Farm in Oroville grows dozens of pear varieties, bringing to market only what fruit is ready. He picks based on how the fruit is drooping from its branch, but he said pressure-testing tools are the most exact way of telling when a pear is ripe or ripe enough to harvest. A pear that feels ripe enough to eat, while it is still hanging from the tree, is probably rotten in the middle, as pears ripen from the inside out.

But unless you’re buying pears directly from the farmer, you can count on that pear having been picked weeks, if not months, before. Carl says after a pear is picked, it’s put in a cold room, kept between 30° and 36°F, for a few weeks before being moved to a warmer cold box, somewhere in the 60°F range. When you pick a pear, look for shiny, taut skin. Buy pears on the hard side and keep at room temperature, but not in direct sun, when you take them home.

If there’s a bit of give when you apply pressure to the stem end, your pear is ripe. If a pear’s belly is soft to the touch, the pear is probably past its prime and possibly overripe to a point of mushiness.

There are innumerable opinions about which pear varieties are best for one application over another. I have heard that you never want to poach a Comice because it’s best eaten out of hand. It’s true that the Doyenne du Comice has one of the sexiest, silkiest textures when perfectly ripe. This is a pear meant to melt in your mouth. Its flavor is sweet but with a dash of acid for balance. Legend says that to cast aspersions in the presence of this regal fruit is to risk bruising—it is that delicate!

Pear brandy, a potent distilled spirit, should, at its best, smell ripe and heady like you’ve just walked into a pear’s inner sanctum. I once had the illegal pleasure of helping to make a batch created from thousands of overripe pears squashed old-school style by foot, and then cooked in a gorgeous Portuguese hand-hammered, shimmering copper still. I loved the concept. Also known as Pear Eau de Vie, the spirit is achieved by making concentrated liquid evaporate and forcing its “steam,” the essential scent of all those pears, to turn into a liquid. The result is a fierce extract of everything there is to fall in lust with a pear.

Some say when poaching a whole pear it’s best to pick a slightly unripe one. If I can impress upon you nothing but what I am about to say about pears, and thus all fruit, working with unripe fruit is bad. It just is. There is no excuse for it. Ripe figs are best for grilling. Ripe apples make the best pies, sauce, and cider. Ripe melons taste the sweetest, the muskiest.

The je ne sais quoi of the taste you’re chasing, like love before betrayal, is ripeness. It is not the sweetness of the sugar syrup you’re poaching unripe fruit in. No! That taste, the one in back of your mouth, closest to where millions of microscopic volatile particles are being read by your nose as a ripe fruit’s perfume, fleeting and barely capture-able, is the taste you can’t put your finger on; the elusive immortal flavor scent is unilateral ripeness, nothing else. No manipulation, interference, or infusions can substitute or imitate fruit picked at exactly the right moment. When approaching fall and thinking of what plated desserts to make with pears, I first take into consideration what else is in season. Because I know a pear is sweet but subtle in definitive flavor, I look for nuts and other fruits that will not be too competitive—although a little struggle in the mouth or intellect can keep a pear dessert and the diner choosing it on their toes, so to speak.

Pears take a striking pose when plated upright, stem still intact. As far as flesh structure goes, most pears will hold together beautifully if sautéed, roasted, or baked alone and within buttery doughs. In fact, a pear must come into contact with heat, through and through, in order to stop the fruit’s rapid oxidation. Rubbing a pear with lemon juice can arrest this process, but the flavor of citrus screams far louder than a pear’s diminutive volume.

Shari Saunders, pastry chef at Lulu during my tenure, created one of the best pear desserts I’ve ever encountered. She poached cored and quartered pears in red wine, and then drained and baked them under a blanket of cornmeal sweet dough overlaying a shallow ramekin. It was simply served with whipped crème fraiche.

Because most pears sport a sandy texture, they enjoy being wrapped in and juxtaposed against crunchy textures, like phyllo and puff pastry. Sweet and green spicy herbs such as rosemary, thyme, verbena, and even oregano like a pear’s company. And hundreds of spices will work well with pears. A sabayon, or any light egg custard, is also complementary—I once made a warm and deeply flavorful pear tart with browned-butter pastry cream between fanned fruit and buttery crust.

If vanilla is a perfect match for pears, so is chocolate and maybe even coffee. Coffee and pears. This is what’s on my mind for pears these days. With a new pastry chef position in a brand new restaurant on my horizon, I’m trying out all the ways I can make pears and coffee go together. Is the coffee in the form of ice cream, cake, custard, or crunch? Will the pears be roasted, poached, churned into cool sorbet, cubed, or left whole, sitting pretty on the plate as it’s whisked through the dining room, enchanting diners with its bella figura?