When the pears come in on a pear tree, they all ripen at once! Looking for a way to save your pear harvest but don’t want all of the sugar? Try this amazing pear butter recipe! And as an update for this article, I’ve added a link to FREE super cute pear canning labels you can download now!
I first tried this recipe about ten years ago when we first moved in to the farmhouse. Our neighbors gifted us with a welcome box of Bartlett pears from their orchard. These pears were at their peak of ripeness. They were soft and juicy and sweet. Frankly, if the juice of the pear doesn’t run down your chin while you’re eating, the pear isn’t ripe enough for me. And these were the best!
So we had a whole box of these fresh picked orchard pears, and I needed to start using them up fast, before they became over-ripe. After eating them with cheese and crackers, making drunken pears, pear jam, and even a valiant attempt at making poached pears, I still had more pears and was running out of ideas.
This pear butter Is so easy and there is no minimum or maximum amount of pears needed. That’s the best part about this recipe – you just use however many pears you have. It is a great way to use up a lot of fruit quickly.
Another great thing about this recipe is that it is the exact same process if you are making apple butter, asian pear butter, or even other types of fruit. The process of cooking the fruit slowly in the slow cooker makes the job far easier and pretty much foolproof. There’s no worry of scorching the fruit, which could easily happen on the stovetop unless you babysit it the whole time. Who wants to do that??
What is Pear Butter Anyway?
No, there is no butter in pear butter. A fruit butter, the most common being apple butter, is just a highly concentrated form of pureed fruit. Fruit butters are smooth and silky. They get their name because after all of the moisture has evaporated out during the cooking process, the fruit spreads like soft butter.
Most often they are made with a double cook process. First cooking to soften, then pureeing, there is usually a second cook to remove the moisture. But this recipe is much easier – taking out the puree and second cook process, thanks to your slow cooker.
Pear Butter is great as a spread on toast, crackers with cheese, pancakes, served with cottage cheese, on top of muffins, or swirl it in your oatmeal. You can also use it as a sandwich spread with turkey and cheese, as a sauce for roasted poultry, or as a topping for an ice cream parfait!
Instructions to Make Pear Butter
- Peel and core a bunch of pears, asian pears, or apples. The amount is totally not important! (I love this recipe). You can do halves, Big chunks, little chunks, whatever.
- Dump all of the cleaned fruit into a slow cooker with a little bit of apple juice (or water). You need just a little bit on the bottom of the slow cooker at the start to ensure that the fruit doesn’t scorch.
- Set the slow cooker to high and cook until soft and thick. For a large batch of very juicy & ripe pears, this could take 10-12 hours. Check on the fruit occasionally, and stir to ensure even cooking. If you want, you could use an immersion blender to speed the process up, but this is not required. The fruit will eventually break down on their own.
- If the pears are not quite ripe, add about 1/2 C sugar. You won’t need to do this for ripe pears. But you can adjust the sugar to your own taste.
- Now the fun part! Add some spice to the mixture. For pears, I like to keep the spices light so that the floral flavor of the pear can shine through. Usually I add a little vanilla and ginger. For apples, I love adding cinnamon and nutmeg. But you can experiment to suit your own palate.
- If you are water bath canning the pear butter, processing time at a rolling boil is 15 minutes. (Because you are processing out all of the water in the fruit, the sugar concentration percent is much higher. So even though you haven’t added extra sugar, this is safe for water bath canning).
