Pumpkin Butter Recipe: Homemade with Heirloom Squash

Homemade pumpkin butter is the best thing that happens to a pie pumpkin after the puree is made. It is not butter and there is no dairy in it. It is squash cooked down slowly with cider, sugar and spice until the water leaves and what remains is dark, thick and spreadable. One medium heirloom pumpkin gives you three or four half-pint jars, it takes about two hours of mostly unattended stovetop time, and it tastes nothing like the jarred version at the grocery store.

This is the recipe we make in Newton, Kansas every October, scaled for a home kitchen and written for the squash we actually grow. If you have not roasted your pumpkin yet, start with our guide to pumpkin puree from scratch and come back here with two cups of it.

Start with a dense-fleshed pie pumpkin

The variety matters more here than in almost any other pumpkin recipe, because pumpkin butter is a reduction. Whatever water is in the flesh has to boil off, and whatever flavor is in the flesh gets concentrated. A watery, stringy carving pumpkin will cook for three hours and still taste thin.

What you want is a Cucurbita moschata or a true pie type with dense, deep-orange, low-fiber flesh. Dickinson is the standard for good reason, it is the variety behind most commercial canned pumpkin, and its flesh is thick and almost dry. Long Island Cheese is sweeter and a little softer, and it makes a butter with more caramel to it. Both are in our pie pumpkin seed duo, which is the pairing we plant when we know we will be making butter and puree from the same harvest.

If you are choosing varieties for next season with the kitchen in mind, our baker's guide to pie pumpkin varieties ranks them by flesh density and sugar rather than by size.

Homemade pumpkin butter recipe

Makes about three half-pint jars. Total time roughly two hours, of which maybe fifteen minutes is active.

Ingredients

• 2 cups roasted pumpkin puree, well drained
• 3/4 cup apple cider (unsweetened) or apple juice
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar, plus more to taste
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup or honey
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon fine salt

Method

1. Drain the puree. Set it in a fine sieve over a bowl for twenty minutes. Homegrown puree holds more water than canned, and this one step cuts your cooking time nearly in half.
2. Combine everything in a heavy-bottomed saucepan or a small Dutch oven. Whisk until the sugar dissolves and there are no dry pockets of spice.
3. Bring it to a bare simmer over medium-low heat, then drop the heat to low. You want the surface to move, not to bubble hard. Pumpkin butter spits when it gets too hot, so leave the lid ajar rather than sealed.
4. Stir every ten minutes with a flat-edged wooden spoon or silicone spatula, scraping the bottom corners of the pan. Sugar plus dense puree scorches without warning.
5. Cook 60 to 90 minutes until it darkens from pumpkin orange to a deep russet brown and thickens noticeably.
6. Taste and adjust at the end, off the heat. Add brown sugar a tablespoon at a time if your squash was less sweet than expected, or another squeeze of lemon if it tastes flat.

How to tell when it is thick enough

Drag the spoon across the bottom of the pan. If the trail holds open for a second or two before the butter creeps back in, it is done. A second check: spoon a little onto a cold plate and tilt it. Finished pumpkin butter mounds and slides slowly. If a ring of liquid separates out around the edge, keep cooking.

It will firm up further as it cools, so stop a shade thinner than you want it on the toast.

Do not water-bath can pumpkin butter

This is the part most recipes online get wrong, and it matters. There is no tested, approved home-canning process for pumpkin butter or for any mashed or pureed pumpkin. Pumpkin puree is low in acid and dense enough that heat cannot move through it reliably, so neither a water bath nor a pressure canner can guarantee a safe result at home. Adding lemon juice does not fix this, and neither does a longer boil.

Pumpkin and winter squash can be safely pressure canned, but only as peeled, cubed flesh in liquid, never mashed or pureed. Our guide to preserving pumpkin walks through the cubes-only method along with freezing and dehydrating.

How to store homemade pumpkin butter

Refrigerate it in clean jars and use it within about two weeks. For longer keeping, freeze it. Leave half an inch of headspace, freeze flat if you are using bags, and it holds its flavor for a good six months. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator and stir it once before serving, since a little liquid may separate.

Small jars freeze and thaw better than large ones, and half-pints are close to the amount a household will finish before anyone gets tired of it.

Ways to change it

Swap the apple cider for pear cider and cut the cinnamon in half, and the squash flavor comes forward instead of the spice. A split vanilla bean dropped in for the last twenty minutes turns it into something closer to a dessert spread. A tablespoon of bourbon stirred in off the heat is very good on a biscuit. For a deeper, less sweet version, use all maple syrup and no brown sugar and cook it ten minutes longer.

Beyond toast, it goes into oatmeal, onto a cheese board next to a sharp cheddar, folded into whipped cream for a pie topping, or thinned with a splash of cider and brushed over roasted carrots.

Grow the squash that makes it

The reason homemade pumpkin butter is worth the two hours is that you control the squash, and dense heirloom flesh is something the grocery store rarely sells. Plant a dense-fleshed pie type this coming season and the butter you cook down next October will be better than anything you can buy in a jar.

Browse our pie pumpkin seeds and pick the varieties you want simmering on the stove next fall.

All seeds ship from Newton, Kansas. Free shipping on qualifying US orders.