From 7 inches deep of juice soaked fruit in the crock to 3 inches of super thick amazing tasting fruit butter.
We were given a 6 pound food service can of diced Pears in light syrup and 1.5 pounds frozen blueberries. I poured the entire can of kind of undercooked pretty bland pears into a 6 qt crockpot and added the frozen blueberries. I put the lid on it and cooked it on high for 90 minutes.
After the hour and a half was up I tasted it and was kind of surprised that it needed sugar
I seldom use sugar in fruit butter but this needed it despite the syrup the pears were in. After another hour I decided to speed things up since I don’t usually have so much liquid in the pot while making fruit butter so I poured off most of the liquid into a smaller crockpot and added another cup of sugar and let it cook on high with the lid off.
Five hours later I had a thick sweet blueberry syrup.
This is an amazing way to salvage fruit, I have done this with “windfall fruit” a huge bin of organic apples that had bruises and holes. It took a few hours to cut out the bad parts but I ended up with 2 full crockpot of sliced up apples and reduced it to until it filled nearly an entire large crockpot.
I also do this with fruit that is over ripe but has not gone bad. Often it is Apples or Pears that are very sweet but a bit softer than I like.
Here is the reduced blueberries and pears after cooking in a crockpot for 6 hours with a splatter screen on in place of a lid. This is after they reduced from 7 inches of juicy fruit in liquid to 3 inches of thick mashed fruit butter
While I had Blueberry Pear Butter reducing in one crock and Blueberry syrup in another I also had a smaller crock going with 6 slightly soft apples and left over fresh pears that had simply started to get brown skin, they were perfect for eating but would have gone bad before I finished them.
I also have make apples this way as pie filling by not cooking as long and leaving fruit in slices instead of mashed. To thicken the pie filling I added some of the apple butter I had made before.
