A couple weeks ago, I moved into a house south of BYU's campus. It is the cutest little house and I love the ambiance that comes with tall ceilings and wood floors. One unexpected pleasure of the house is the presence of a pear tree by the driveway. The pears were beginning to ripen soon after I moved in. Some friends helped me pick the majority of the pears on the tree.
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| Pears waiting patiently to be made into deliciousness |
Once they ripened I decided to make pear butter from them. For those that don't know, pear butter is like super thick spiced pear sauce. It is delicious on toast, pancakes, waffles, german pancake, anything that could use butter or jam. The method I used to make my pear butter was:
Trim out blemishes, the core, and the stem.
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| Pear cores and other pear refuse, the pretty bowl makes it much nicer |
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| Pears ready to cooked down to slush and mush |
Measure about 7 pounds of pears into a large pot with a 1/4 cup of lemon juice and a 1/4 cup of water, I had some fresh ginger root left over from when I made some coconut curry and added that too. Bring to a boil on medium heat and boil for 16 minutes while stirring occasionally. Cover the pot, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for an additional 20 minutes. Puree the cooked pear slush in a food processor, blender, or use a potato masher (if you use a potato masher you may want to first peel the pears).
At this point you can finish the process, or if you are like me, you ran out of time to finish and the pear slush goes in the fridge to be finished the next day (this is a great place to take a break). As I am living in a shared college house, I do not own the necessary equipment to actually can anything. So I convinced (it wasn't hard) my dad to let me use his facilities to finish my pear butter.
Measure together: 3 cups brown sugar, 1 tsp nutmeg, 1 TBSP cinnamon, 3/4 tsp salt. Stir into the puree with 2 TBSP lemon juice. Bring to a boil in a large, heavy bottomed pan; reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour stirring at least every 5 minutes. The goal here is to concentrate the pear sauce to pear butter.
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| The pear sauce thickens to butter as water is driven off as steam |
Once it has thickened, ladle into clean pint jars put lids on them and get them ready to go in the canner.
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| Filled bottles, ready to go in the canner |
Process your bottles in a boiling water canner as I am about 5500' they need to be in for 20 minutes.
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| The canner is ready for the bottles when it is at a rolling boil. |
Once they are done processing the bottles need to be left to cool on the counter. The recipe in here gave 6 bottles, I had enough pears to do a double batch and so ended up with 12 bottles of pear butter. I kept 6 bottles since I provided the ingredients, lids, and labor. I gave 6 bottles to my family for the rental of their kitchen, canner, and bottles. I think it was a great trade off.
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| Caramel Pear Butter |
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