NATURAL PEAR BUTTER

Someone brought some pears from their yard recently to share with the volunteers at Hillcrest Thrift Shop, the thrift shop where my husband and I volunteer.  Not too many people were taking them so my husband brought home a bag of them.  He was hoping I would make some pear preserves like I did a couple of years ago.  He said he would peel them for me.

Well, that was probably a week ago.  Yesterday he asked me if I had figured out something to do with them...(I had told him there were not enough pears to make pear preserves.)  Fortunately for me, I had seen a recipe yesterday morning for apple or pear butter in my Recipes to lower your Fat Thermostat cookbook.  It is different from most recipes I found online for pear butter.

The recipe for apple or pear butter called for 4 quarts of fruit.  We had thrown out a couple of pears that had gone bad due to bruises so we were left with about 2 pounds.  I told him I would just cut the recipe in half.  I am giving the recipe as it appears in the cookbook with my amounts in parenthesis.

True to his word, he peeled the pears and I cut them in fourths to get the core out.  I didn't have the apple juice called for in the recipe but decided I would use lemon juice.  That would keep the pears from turning dark. 

APPLE OR PEAR BUTTER

4  (2)  quarts  fruit, peeled and cored
1/4  (1/4)  cup apple juice (lemon juice)
1  (1/2)  teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2  (1/4)  teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2  (1/4)  teaspoon allspice or cloves

Put fruit into large pan.

Add the apple (lemon) juice, cover, ....

and simmer til soft.

(We transferred the cooked pears to another bowl.)

Mash with a potato masher. 













(I offered to use the mixer, but my husband likes "chunky".)

Add the spices.

Using a funnel, I spooned the mixture into two pint canning jars.

The recipe ends by simply saying, "Serve over pancakes or whole wheat toast."   I went online and found several recipes (none this simple) and they all said to waterbath the jars for 10 minutes.  A couple of recipes that made smaller amounts said to store in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks.

So this morning I opened one of the jars and put the "butter" in two half pint freezer containers and put them in the freezer.










All the recipes I found online had sugar plus other ingredients added to the mixture and cooked it in various ways.  

This recipe could obviously be called Natural Pear Butter.  It isn't sweet but that is just the way my husband likes it.  I know it looks like in the picture I took that there wasn't any of the pear butter on the half that he took a bite from, but it did.  He likes it.  In fact tonight at dinner he ate some on his toast.  I don't think it will last a couple of weeks at the rate he is eating it.  But I do have the two half pints in the freezer for later.