Strawberry Apple Butter In Instant Pot

Instant pot strawberry apple butter is smooth, delicious, flavored with cinnamon and vanilla and so easy to make at home from scratch using the instant pot. Just like this banana apple butter and peach butter, this is so delicious and perfect for topping toast, oatmeal, ice creams, pancakes etc!

The strawberry apple butter is made using fresh strawberries and apples and paired with cinnamon to make it perfect for the fall season and Thanksgiving holidays.

Try this apple cobbler and apple cake if you love easy apple desserts!

You can also prepare instant pot strawberry applesauce (instant pot applesauce no sugar recipe here) instead of turning this into butter consistency.

To do that, skip the butter in the ingredients and you do not need any additional simmering more than a couple of minutes, after which you can blend the contents through a food processor to make smooth textured strawberry applesauce (also use regular sugar if you wish).

I so far made mango jam, peach jam, spiced peach butter, plum jam, strawberry honey jam, blueberry jam, strawberry compote, peach compote and cinnamon apple sauce (no sugar) in the instant pot using fruits and whenever I made something new I thought that is the most delicious thing I ever made in the instant pot.

However, I am convinced that this strawberry apple butter is simply the most delicious thing I ever made in the instant pot or the most delicious thing I recently as much as I remember.

The flavor was so good and the stuff is totally delicious.

What Is Apple Butter?

If you have never used apple butter, you may wonder what is apple butter and what is the difference between apple butter & applesauce, right?

I have wondered the same before tasting and enjoying both and making them myself to know the difference.

To answer the first question, apple butter is simply apples (usually with added spices like cinnamon and sweetener like brown sugar) cooked down to a buttery consistency which is easily spreadable and can be used in place of regular butter with bread.

Difference Between Applesauce And Apple Butter

Applesauce is of sauce consistency as you can guess and you can make applesauce smooth by blending until smooth using a blender or you can enjoy chunky applesauce as well if you like it that way.

Applesauce can be made using just apples and water and you can add additional ingredients too like sugar, cinnamon or lemon juice if you want to add more flavor.

I have this easy applesauce recipe on stove top as well as instant pot cinnamon applesauce recipe where you can read how I prepared the applesauce.

A lot of eggless & vegan recipes use applesauce as an ingredient as it can be easily used as a replacement for eggs in baking.

See recipe for moist applesauce cake where we use applesauce to make the cake.

Applesauce doesn't need much cooking as we just need to cook the apples until it breaks down and then we mash or blend the contents to a smooth or preferred saucy consistency.

With apple butter, you need to cook the apples for a longer time to attain the spreadable butter like consistency. Its more of a buttery texture, as you can assume, than the jam like consistency.

I love adding a tablespoon of regular butter to the fruit butter, to make it even more rich and buttery, but this is just a preference and not a necessary thing to do.

With apple butter, its more common to add spices like cinnamon and use brown sugar unlike applesauce.

In brief, the main difference between applesauce and apple butter is that applesauce needs less cooking time while apple butter needs a longer time to reach the buttery consistency.

The main difference between both is in the texture, with applesauce having a saucy texture while apple butter have the perfect butter like texture and consistency.

If you want to try a slow cooker apple butter recipe, I found a great recipe here.

What Is Strawberry Apple Butter?

With this strawberry apple butter, we also cook strawberries along with the apples to make apple butter, so the resulting apple butter is even more delicious and rich with flavors from apples & strawberries!

This is also a great recipe to use if you have leftover strawberries and apples at home, which you don't know what to do with.

By using the instant pot, you can cut down a lot of time on making the apple butter (which takes more time on the stove top) though it obviously takes more than the applesauce.

How To Make Strawberry Apple Butter In Instant Pot?

We need the following ingredients to make the best strawberry apple butter.

Ingredients used:

2 cups strawberries

4 large apples

1.5 cups brown sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon powder

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons lemon juice taken from half of a medium sized lemon

1 tablespoon butter

Step By Step Instructions

Wash the strawberries very well, trim the ends to discard any leaves and slice in halves. Transfer the sliced strawberries to the instant pot.

Also wash the apples very well, peel, core and roughly slice into medium sized pieces. Transfer the apple slices also to the instant pot.

Add the brown sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon powder, mix everything well.

Close the instant pot with lid in sealing position and cook in high pressure for 10 minutes.

Do a natural pressure release.

Once the pressure is all released, carefully and gradually open the lid.

Add the vanilla extract also to the instant pot, stir the contents and mash the contents using a potato masher.

Simmer the contents using the saute function, while you continue to stir and mash the contents.

Continue to simmer (stir and mash often to avoid burning at the bottom of the pot) for about 20 to 25 minutes until the desired butter consistency is reached (it took 25 minutes for me).

On the final stage of preparation, also add the butter also to the instant pot (if using), stir in and simmer until the butter is melted into the pot and simmer for another one to two more minutes while you stir.

The delicious strawberry apple butter is ready, allow the contents to cool down, once its cooled you can transfer to dry, clean and air tight glass containers and store in refrigerator for about two weeks of time.

Tips To Make The Best Apple Butter In Instant Pot

Using an instant pot saves a lot of time in preparing the homemade apple butter from scratch and my tips for making the best tasting apple butter are below:

Use fresh fruits always - In this recipe, we use apple and strawberries. Even if they are leftover fruits, make sure to use good quality, fresh fruits to make the butter.

Use a tablespoon of real butter - Yes the dairy! If you follow a vegan diet you can try a dairy free vegan butter and you may also skip the butter altogether, but for the best results I highly recommend adding a tablespoon of butter for the rich, delicious flavor.

Spice & Flavor - Make sure to use the cinnamon powder & vanilla extract for the best flavor like the one I made.

Use brown sugar - you can use dark brown sugar or light brown sugar depending on what you have but if you have the dark brown sugar, I recommend using that.

If you do not have brown sugar, you may use regular white sugar, but using the brown sugar gives you best results in terms of color and flavor for this strawberry apple butter.

So above are the tips and tricks I wanted to share with you on preparing the best apple butter.

If you have any tips that you wish to share, please feel free to share them in the comment section.

How Long You Can Store The Instant Pot Apple Butter?

Also, this is a small batch apple butter made in the instant pot, which is not meant for canning.

You can transfer the prepared apple butter to dry, clean and air tight glass jars and store in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks. I haven't tried storing this for more longer periods yet.

You can spread this strawberry apple butter easily in your toast, pancakes, waffles etc for a delicious breakfast or use it as a filling or mix in with puddings or anything as you desire.

I never thought making strawberry apple butter or even apple butter be so easy at home.

Thanks to the instant pot, it had been so easy to make the strawberry apple butter at home using the leftover strawberries and apples that I had.

Though they were leftover fruits, they were fresh and perfect to be used in this strawberry apple butter recipe.

Along with cinnamon powder, I also used vanilla extract to flavor the apple butter and I also used a dollop of rich butter (dairy) to add even more flavor to the apple butter.

This addition of butter is totally optional, and you can leave it out if you want it to be dairy free and vegan.