With a glut of aging homegrown pumpkins harvested last year, I decided to turn them into butter… at the end of July. (Am I super early, or way too late?! I didn’t want them to go bad, as they were sitting around almost a year.)

I found recipes all over the place in terms of sweetness. I settled on a 4 to 1 ratio of pumpkin to sugar (by weight). That allows the inherent flavors of the pumpkin to come through.

You could of course, in a fix, ahem, use canned pumpkin puree (but not pumpkin pie filling, as it is already sweetened), to make a simple fresh pumpkin butter.

My instant pot is quickly gaining prominence in my kitchen. Here, it is useful in slow cooker mode.

To start from fresh pumpkins (use a slow cooker!):

1. slice them along their “equator” and remove seeds and pulp.
2. Add halved pumpkins (if need be, slice them further to fit them) to a slow cooker, flesh side down, and cook on low for 5-6 hours, until fork tender.
3. Let cool, then scoop flesh from the skins, and use for this recipe, or store separately.

I substituted what I had on hand (mature kombucha) for apple juice/cider.

Note, as most other recipes for pumpkin butter will also warn you, that this recipe is not acidic enough to be safely stored after water bath canning. The batch of pumpkin butter I made had a pH of 4.9, just slightly outside the safe zone (4.6 pH) for water bath canning. An alternative preservation method for low acid foods such as squash is pressure canning. Personally I haven’t done much with that method. If you have, please leave a comment!

Bottom line, without using any canning method, just treat this dish as a fresh food, storable in the fridge for a few weeks, or you could freeze it, too.