05 · About the kitchen
Three of us cook lekvar in Austin, and we refuse to make it thin.
Lekvaro is a small food business at 68 Oak Lane, Office 12, Austin, Texas. Three cooks share one kitchen and a row of wide pans. We make plum lekvar, apricot lekvar, dense low-sugar jams, fruit butters and a quince paste, and we sell them by inquiry to home cooks and small bakeries in and around Austin.
Why lekvar · What we actually make
Plum lekvar in Austin, cooked the way kolache bakers used to want it.
Lekvar is Central European fruit butter, cooked down until a spoon stands in it. Central Texas has baked kolaches for generations. Most of the plum filling sold here now is thin, sweet and starchy.
We started cooking plum lekvar because we kept buying the other kind. You know it if you bake: a jar labelled plum filling that turns to syrup at 375°F, boils out of the kolache and welds itself to the tray. Scraping burnt sugar off sheet pans is not a hobby anybody chose.
So we cook it the old way. Prune plums, halved and pitted by hand, skins left on. Into wide shallow pans, because a wide pan gives the water somewhere to go. Then hours of low heat and a spatula along the bottom every few minutes. Plum lekvar takes about nine hours. Most of that is waiting and scraping the bottom of the pan.
Apricot lekvar followed, because linzer cookies need it. Then the jams and butters people asked for: damson, sour cherry, fig and orange, pear with cardamom, cider apple butter, seeded blackberry, Hill Country peach in summer, and a quince paste you slice with a knife. Ten products. That is the whole catalogue, and we keep it short on purpose.
Everything runs less sweet than supermarket jam. One part sugar to four parts fruit. You will taste the plum first. No pectin from a box in the lekvars; apricots and quince bring their own.
Who buys from us: home cooks who want a jar for toast and yogurt, people baking kolaches and hamantaschen for family, and small bakeries and cafés buying 2 lb tubs and 5 lb pails. The bakery side has its own page, tubs and pails for bakers.
- Plum lekvar cook
- About 9 hours, wide pans
- Sugar to fruit
- Roughly 1 : 4 to 1 : 5 by weight
- Bake test
- Holds in a kolache at 375°F
- Fill rate
- A 2 lb tub fills roughly 60 kolaches
- Products
- 10, including one seasonal
- Sizes
- 8 oz, 16 oz, 2 lb tub, 5 lb pail
- Prices
- From $10 to $14 per 8 oz, by product. Indicative, confirmed before anything is made.
- How to buy
- Send an inquiry. No cart, no online payment.
Who stands at which pan
The pans
Stirs, scrapes, decides when it is done
Runs the long reductions and makes the call on every batch. The rule at this station: if it runs off a spoon held sideways, it is not finished. Nothing leaves the pan until it passes the cold-plate test.
The fruit
Sorts, halves, pits, tastes
Takes deliveries, throws out what is past it, and pits a few crates of plums by hand before the pans go on. Also the one who tracks the peach season. Peach preserves happen when Hill Country peaches happen. June to August, then they are gone.
The jars and the phone
Fills, seals, labels, answers you
Jars the hot fruit, checks every lid, writes the batch line, and replies to inquiries. When you send a message, a person who has had their hands in the fruit that week reads it.
Refusals · And the reason for each
Five things we will not make, even when asked nicely.
A short list. Each one costs us sales. We keep it anyway, because every item on it would make the jars worse or the promise false.
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Runny spreadable jam
Thin jam is just underdone jam. It soaks bread, slides off pastry and burns on the tray. Our whole point is fruit that holds a ridge, so a pourable version would undo the reason anyone buys from us.
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Boxed pectin in the lekvars
Commercial pectin sets a jar fast with less cooking, and it tastes of the shortcut. Plums, apricots and quince set themselves if you give them the hours. We give them the hours.
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Starch-thickened bakery filling
Cornstarch fillings look thick cold and go gluey or weep once baked. A bakery asking for a cheaper filling is better served by someone else. We say so on the phone.
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Shipping across state lines
We hand jars over in Austin, by pickup or local delivery. No courier boxes, no broken glass in transit, no promises about a jar we cannot see arrive.
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Peach preserves in February
We make peach only from Texas Hill Country fruit in season. Frozen imported peaches would let us sell it all year. It would also be a different product with the same name.
The fruit · Before it is anything else
Small batches, because the pan sets the size.
A wide pan reduces fast because it is shallow. Fill it deeper and the bottom scorches before the top thickens. So a batch is what fits in the pans at a sensible depth, and that number does not grow just because an order did.
This is why we ask you to inquire instead of clicking buy. We check what is in the pantry, how many jars or tubs that batch gave, and when the next plum cook is. A bakery wanting twelve 5 lb pails may need to wait for two cooks. We would rather say that on day one than miss the date.
Bad fruit does not go in. A crate of soft apricots becomes compost, not a cheaper jar. That is the only quality rule we bother writing down; the rest you can taste.
Reach a person · One of the three
Write or call. One of us answers, every time.
68 Oak Lane, Office 12Austin, Texas 86853
United States
There is no call center and no outsourced inbox. Messages land with the person on jars and phone, and the reply comes from them. We do not publish fixed opening hours; the kitchen keeps cooking hours. If the pans are on when you call, we call back once the batch is off the heat, and email gets an answer the same way.
Leave a phone number or an email with your inquiry. One is enough. We confirm stock, jar count, price and handover before anything is made, and nothing is charged through this site.