Lilikoi Butter Deliciousness

Earlier this year, our lilikoi (pronounced lih-lee-koh-ee) vine gave us a handful of lilikois and I thought that was it because all the other flowers fell off and I thought there would be no more fruit. Months later, the vine is going crazy with fruit, so much that I have at least 60 from the last week! My mother-in-law had been asking about lilikoi butter, so Mr. Pikko asked me to make some for her. I’d never made it before or even tasted it, having mostly just drank passion orange juice or eaten the fruit by itself with sugar. The recipe looked simple enough, but it did have eggs, which made me all nervous because I always screw up cooking with eggs in a new recipe.

Lilikois

Here’s the inside of a lilikoi. You have to get juice from this and since the juice is in little sacs surrounding the seeds, it’s actually quite difficult. Mr. Pikko said he read that you can use a blender on “the lowest setting” to get the juice without grinding the seeds, but my blender doesn’t go by numbers, so I had no idea what to do there.

Juicing the lilikoi

I ended up putting my strainer over my pyrex and scooping the seeds into that. After I’d cut and scooped about 4 fruits, I began mashing it with my pestle, but this got a little frustrating, so what I ended up doing was washing one of the lilikoi halves really well and then using it to press down on the pulp. That worked really well since it was the same shape as the strainer.

Lilikoi Juice

It took about a dozen lilikoi to get a cup of juice. The recipe I was following called for 1 3/4 cup juice, but when I discovered that I didn’t have enough butter, I had to half it and go with 7/8 cup juice. It’s quite a bit of work to get this much juice!

Melted Butter

This is the melted butter, sugar, and lilikoi juice. It smells AMAZING at this stage.

Bubbling

Actually, it just smells amazing from that point on.

You’re supposed to temper scrambled eggs before adding it to the mixture, which I did do, but I was getting frustrated waiting for it to heat up after adding the butter mixture to the eggs like 8 times, so I eventually just poured it in, hoping for the best. As typical with me, the egg whites cooked and I could see egg bits floating around. I had to strain all the egg out, but it looked great after that. I let it cool in containers (since I couldn’t find my mason jars) and then put it in the fridge. We tried it on toast later and it was oh so good!!!

Toast with Lilikoi Butter

We gave a big container to Grandma J and kept the leftovers for ourselves. You can see that it kind of looks like honey. It packs an amazing lilikoi punch and is just so incredibly delicious. I find myself eating toast nearly every morning. I will try this again, but this time will try just using egg yolks instead of the whole egg. The recipe below is a half recipe from Lava Lily. Mahalo for the great instructions!

Next, I’m going to try lilikoi sherbert!

[amd-zlrecipe-recipe:3]

11 thoughts on “Lilikoi Butter Deliciousness”

  1. If you put the lilikoi seed sacks into a blender and just pulse them a couple of times, it should be enough to break the sacks and then you can strain out the seeds and pulp. That’s what I used to do when processing the juice to make the jelly. I’ve never tried making the butter though! Glad to hear it worked out for you.

  2. Thank you for using my recipe! As you may have noticed, that gets a lot of traffic! Everyone loves lilikoi butter. My favorite way is over ice cream or cheesecake.
    Aloha,
    Lucy

  3. I want to make your lilkoi butter to send to my family on the mainland. Do you know if you have to keep it refrigerated if you use proper canning jars and do it like jam??

  4. I have been making this for a couple of year… You can vary the egg amounts (the egg whites is what gets stringy) but I put it in all together so the eggs don’t get stringy on me. Today I tried powered sugar at the same ratio… its in cool in mode right now… FYI you can use cheese clothe for juice… just triple up the clothe and fold it so the grain is going in different directions. When squeezed you get ALL the juice., work’s for me anyways….Cooling process is showing more Jelly like than Butter from using powered sugar. Still Yummy!

  5. I am so happy I stumbled across this!! I have been looking for a good recipe because I’ve tried so many without much success. My lilikoi is just starting to ripen for me so I’ll be trying this recipe soon. It’s such a pleasure to have you share your recipes with everyone. I was born and raised here in Hawaii so a lot of recipes do get passed down from generation to generation. Thank you again!!

  6. I just made my first batch and now have 8 sealed small jars in the fridge. Can I transfer them to the freezer? And for how long will they keep??
    Thanks.

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