Watermelon Butter is thick and delicious – it’s like non-spiced apple butter, only watermelon, and perfect spread on toast or biscuits.


Watermelon Butter
Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime

For Sunday Supper this week the associated bloggers in this group have put together a selection of recipes to preserve the summer harvest.

One of the things I like to do is some measure of canning, although I don’t do it in great volume since I have a small family. I like to put up small batches of pickles (generally just a few jars at a time in the fridge) or a jar or two of jam or apple butter. I don’t have large amounts of produce since I don’t grow melons or apples, and the amount of cukes I grow serves really just for the refrigerator. But I have a few recipes on the blog if you care to peek at those:

Apple Butter

Refrigerator Pickles

I am a bit picky about the kind of apples I use in my butter, and that season starts early (July) and is already past, even though the mountain of harvested apples is still coming in. I might be caught making some with a mix of apples in the late season of mid-September into October, depending on what the orchards have but my apples standards for that are usually Lodi and Transparent apples, not great for either eating or pies, but they make great sauce and butter.

Besides the handful  of cukes (I usually just plant one plant) I also grow a boatload of hot peppers since I like really spicy food. Off and on I will have lots of jalapenos to put up and go through those pretty quickly. I also like making jalapeno jelly although I don’t have the recipe up for that, and make my own hot sauces (no recipes up yet for that either unfortunately). If I run out I often will make some with peppers bought at the market. The recipe I use keeps them nicely solid and not squishy like some over processed  peppers I occasionally find in jars and  cans at the store. Same for pickles. I like them crisp.

This watermelon butter recipe I came up with recycling the pulp leftover from one of my favorites-

Watermelon Lemonade

I like buying the big old-fashioned seeded watermelons as the seedless still have those yucky white seeds. It’s easier for me to get rid of the black seeds. Plus I think those cultivars have much better flavor. Sort of like heirloom melons, if you will. But again, we are back to small families just cannot consume that much melon. This recipe in fact uses the leftovers from about 3/4 of a large one. But you need not worry about that part too much. You can freeze up juice or pulp from any amounts you happen to have leftover. The juice is marvelous in lemonade and I also make wine coolers with it. And beyond that, just freezing the fruit makes for all sorts of great frozen smoothies and cocktails.

Measuring out the pulp

The pulp should be quite thick

But for purposes of this recipe, all the leftover fruit I had, I removed the seeds (both black and white seeds) and pureed it in a food processor (blenders do  the job too). Then I placed that mix into a strainer to  siphon off all the juice, which I used elsewhere. You could probably cook the melon butter  with juice intact since this recipe does include a little apple juice. While the flavor of melon will be slightly stronger though, there is pectin in the apple juice and it does help act as a sort of preservative. So if you are canning for shelf stable/ water bath canning, you will probably want to keep that apple juice in there to keep the quality  of the product from degrading over time as quickly. But for purposes of this recipe, it will just get you about one small jar, so you don’t have to worry about that.

The pulp ready to cook

Watermelon butter bubbling away

But anyway, after the juice is taken away from the pureed fruit, the pulp will remain, And this is good stuff- gold in fact if you want to use every bit of it. Once it cooks down, you can just refrigerate it and not worry about the canning  part, the same way  you would treat partial jars while canning or canning that do not effectively seal: off to the refrigerator it goes! And being one small jar, that’s just fine.

Very thick when finished cooking

Here is the watermelon butter cooling in the jar

The whole operation is quite easy, if you don’t mind seeding the melon. I recruited help from others and made quick work of it. I do hope you enjoy it as something a little different. Be sure to check out the rest of the recipes in this week’s edition of Sunday Supper, and don’t forget to pin all your favorite recipes to save for later.

~Sue

Saving Summer Harvest

As part of the Sunday Supper Movement, I and a host of other food bloggers are pleased to present to you some of our favorite recipes to preserve and keep the produce of the summer harvest.

Special thanks to Stacy of Food Lust People Love and Heather at Hezzi-D’s Books and Cooks for graciously hosting this event and working so hard to make sure all the I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed. It’s a big group and a ton of work to keep all together! Thanks so much.

Canning

• Blackberry Chia Seed Jam from Books -n- Cooks
• Cherry Lemon Jam from Food Lust People Love
• Chocolate Blackberry Preserves from The Redhead Baker
• Gilded Bluebarb Jam from What Smells So Good?
• Hamburger Dill Chips from A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Piri Piri Hot Sauce from Curious Cuisiniere
• Southwestern Salsa from The Freshman Cook
• Spiced Peach Jam from Cosmopolitan Cornbread
• Spiced Vanilla Rhubarb Jam from Hezzi-D’s Books and Cooks
• Strawberry Balsamic Syrup from Cindy’s Recipes and Writings
• Watermelon Butter from Palatable Pastime

Dehydrating

• Dried Pineapple from Take A Bite Out of Boca

Fermentation

• Fermented Spicy Daikon Spears + A Cocktail from Culinary Adventures with Camilla

Freezing

• How to Freeze Blueberries from Pies and Plots
• Peach Crisp from That Skinny Chick Can Bake
• Roast Tomato Soup with Basil-Butter Croutons from Caroline’s Cooking
• Summer Veggies from Momma’s Meals

Infusing

• Raspberry Vinegar from Magnolia Days

Pickling

• Bread & Butter Pickles from Adventures in All Things Food
• Homemade Bread and Butter Pickles from Life Tastes Good
• Mustard Pickles from Jane’s Adventures in Dinner
• Pickled Cherries with Five Spices from Nosh My Way

Preserving in oil or butter

• Garden Herb Butter from An Appealing Plan
• Spinach and Pistachio Pesto from Bobbi’s Kozy Kitchen

Join my recipe group on Facebook for  more recipes from blogger friends around the world!

Palatable Recipes

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