Instructions

1. Use pears that give under your thumb at the neck. A hard pear is mostly starch and grit, and neither of those turns into anything worth eating on a sheet.
2. Blend the pears, raspberries, honey, lemon juice and the scraped vanilla seeds to a thick puree with no lumps left. A lump of pear inside the sheet is a wet spot that stays wet.
3. Push the puree through a sieve if seeds bother you, but you will lose some body doing it. Raspberry seeds are what give this leather its slight grit, and most people would rather keep them.
4. Spread the puree on a lined tray to about the thickness of a coin, thinner in the middle than around the rim. The outer edge sits in the fastest-moving air and will be done first, so give it less to lose.
5. Dry at 105 °F for 7 hours. This is a low, slow setting, so do not be alarmed that the sheet still looks wet halfway through — the color going from bright pink to a deeper rose is the better sign of progress.
6. The sheet is ready when a fingertip pressed into the centre lifts away clean and the surface has stopped looking glossy. If the middle still prints, leave it and look again in an hour.
7. Peel it off the mat while it is warm and lay it straight onto parchment paper. A pear leather cools sticky and will weld itself to the mat if you let it go cold there.
8. Cut it through the paper, roll it up, and keep the rolls in a sealed jar with a desiccant sachet. Honey draws moisture back out of the air, which is why these need the sachet where a plain fruit leather does not, and they will keep about a month.