A friend of mine and myself (years ago) decided to can up all those Kieffer pears her trees had produced. (yeah, right). we settled on pear butter since it's a cooked recipe and Kieffers are like rocks unless you process the dickens out of them. We peeled, sliced, diced, did everything known but we still had pear chunk, not butter. Finally after cooking down a ways we hit on the idea of putting them through the blender. She had a big wooden spoon she'd use to 'mash down' the pears and occasionally, left the blender running and the spoon would 'oops' disappear a little into the pear pulp. It was fun because we did it together but hard work to do anything with Kieffers. However, I've since made pear butter several times and never did get the rave reviews we got with her 'spoon secret'!! martha