Well kids. The Tigress Can Jam challenge this month was anything that ended in “erries” and since this is my summer of fruit butters, I have made a batch of blueberry butter. Last weekend, my friend Shay and I took a little drive out to my favorite blueberry pickin’ spot in South Jersey and spent a couple of hours rattling berries from branches, filling our buckets and bellies.
However, the true treat of the day came when we rounded the corner of the farm stand in order to pay for our hauls. Standing right in front was my cousin Amy, out for a day of picking with her partner and two of their grandkids. We had one of those truly lovely moments, when you gape open-mouthed for a moment before laughing and falling into hugs.
Once home with my seven and a half pounds of berries, I spent several days eating them popcorn-style out of bowls, before hunkering down and making a preservation plan for the rest. Last year I called blueberry my foundational jam and that’s still a phrase that feels correct. I will always love that simple jam (in fact, I still have some from last year), but this time around I wanted to try something slightly different.
Originally I had planned to make a blueberry butter spiked with a hint of lavender, but this week was busy enough that I didn’t have a chance to get to Reading Terminal Market and that’s the only place close by where I can get food-grade lavender. So I went simple and stuck with my mom’s preferred flavor profile of lemon zest, cinnamon and just a bit of nutmeg.
Lately, I’ve been turning to two gadgets to make my preserving work just a little bit easier to accomplish. The first is my trusty Vita-mix. I grew up with the vintage chrome version of this incredible blender and so during wedding time last year, made it a priority to dedicate some of our gifted resources to acquiring my own.
While I had an inkling that it had the potential to be a transformative piece of equipment, I had no idea how it would revolutionize my jam making. Here’s what makes it so special: When you run it on very low speed, it doesn’t puree the fruit. It just chops it up into small bits, which coincidentally, are the absolutely perfect size for jams and butters. I know it’s a little bit unfair to rave about something that’s so darned expensive, but really, this thing has changed my life for the better.
The other small electrical appliance (that happens to be on the very other end of the cost spectrum) that I’m using all the time these days is my ancient, $3-at-a-thrift-store slow cooker. I’ve found that older slow cookers are far superior to newer ones, because they cook at lower temperatures. Truly, food safety regulations have made it so that what was once the high setting on the old pots is now the low setting on the new ones (you should never be able to achieve a boil in one of the pots from the seventies or eighties). And when you’re cooking a butter, you want to cook it as low and slow as you can. Slow cookers are truly perfect for this.
This particular butter reminds me a bit of blueberry pie, which makes it a winner in my book. Tomorrow morning, I’m having some friends over to do a little fruit butter tasting (in recent days, I’ve also made apricot butter and sweet cherry butter). We’ll see if they like the blueberry version as much as I do.
Ingredients
- 8 cups of pureed blueberries
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 lemon, zested
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
Instructions
- Put the pureed blueberries in a slow cooker. Place a lid on the pot and turn it on to low. After about an hour, give it a stir. At this point, you want to use something to prop the lid a bit. I found that laying a wooden spoon across the rim of the cooker and then placing the lid on gave it just enough room to let the steam evaporate.
- My blueberry butter spent about six hours in the slow cooker (from 5:30 p.m. when I got home from work, until 11:30 p.m. when I canned and processed it). At the beginning of hour five, I added the spices and the sugar, removed the lid completely and turned the heat up to high, in order to speed the cooking down.
- Once it’s cooked down sufficiently*, pour into jars (leave a good 1/2 inch of head space), wipe rims, apply lids and screw on bands. Process in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes. Eat on fresh scones and store unopened jars in a cool, dark place.
Notes
*When the cooking process is done, you can puree with an immersion blender or (carefully) in a regular blender, for a smoother product. It depends on whether you like your butters a bit chunky or very smooth.
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As I do not have a boiling water canner but do have a Dutch oven: Is it OK – or possible – to put the jelly jars in the Dutch oven? If so, do the jars go right on the bottom of the pot or do they need a rack? Should the jars be touching each other – touching sides of the pot? How much water should be in the pot? An inch over the top of the sealed jars? After they are processed, should I handle them as I do for tomatoes processed in the pressure cooker – remove to clean folded towel to cool & seal collapses & screw band is tightened after contents cools a little? Can the jars be frozen? (it would not be possible to find a cool spot in the house, unless 75 degrees is considered cool) I would love to give these as Christmas gifts, as well as have some for myself. Many thanks for your help.
Can you can these? i made some pineapple butter and now i have about 10 jars and im wondering what to do with it can it, freeze it or what?
There are canning recipes written into the recipe, so yes, you can can this one. I’ve never made pineapple butter, so I don’t know if it can be canned.
Wow sorry if that sounded snakry lol didn’t relise that till i re-read it after i posted :/ im new to canning and not sure if you need some special preservative to make sure it safe.
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I’ve a bunch of Saskatoon berries that I picked this Summer.. at the time, I’d never canned a thing in my life, or thought that I would! ..fast forward 2 months later, and its a whole other story.
This sounds like a fantastic way to use some of those berries, though I’m wondering if I should just wait until next summer, or if my frozen ones would be okay?
If you’re not familiar, Saskatoons are similar to Blueberries.
Great recipe! I just happen to have an old (smaller) slo cooker, perfect for this.
I’m always confused on the conflicting advice on how much space to leave at top of jar. Some recipes say fill it right up, as this STOPS any mould getting in, others the exact opposite! Which one is it? It can’t be both! Thanks.
Jars won’t seal if you don’t leave some headspace. And if you’re processing your jars in a boiling water bath, you kill off any mold spores, so they are not an issue.
That’s that then! Thank you.
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