Making Elderflower Cordial

[Kerry Beal]

And there are more blossoms already on the elderberry - so if I remember when I get home from work tonight I'll cut some and make a small batch myself.  Note to self - will need lemons!

[DianaM]

If you don't have a chance to make it, come by and I'll gladly share some of mine.

[Kerry Beal]

 

Under construction.

 

 

[blue_dolphin]

I finally got around to trying my hand at some elderflower cordial.  I picked the umbrels off trees I spotted along Grimes Canyon Road when I was driving over to Fillmore to the bakery on Saturday morning.  As I was driving home, I was dismayed to see a lot of little bugs crawling out of the bag I'd collected the flowers in.  Luckily, they stayed over on the passenger side and I maintained my composure to deal with the twisty parts of Grimes Canyon

and I made it safely home. 

I Googled the bug issue and found some people suggested rinsing the flowers to get rid of them.  So I did that.  Then I read other comments that the flowers should not be rinsed because they are so delicate and you'll lose a lot of flavor.  Oh well.  

I found what sounded like a better plan - to spread the flowers out on a clean white cloth and keep moving them to another cloth or area until no more bugs come out.  I'll do that next time.  It's pretty easy to separate the flowers from the bugs on the cloth as the bugs seem to hang on or stick to the cloth and you can easily dump the flowers off.  I think most of the bugs actually crawled off the flowers on to the bag shortly after picking.  

I did almost abandon the whole business at this time but decided to continue.

My harvest, after unadvisable rinsing, spread out on a clean cloth.  

This is still outside, mind you.  I wasn't ready to bring them in the house yet!

I went through them, snipped off any stems and tossed out the umbrels that still had a lot of unopened buds. 

Here they are in the white pot after cleaning, with the discards on the left:

I'd weighed them before rinsing and I had about 500g of flowers.  I didn't bother weighing them afterwards since they were still a bit damp. They took up a volume of around 4.5 liters.

I used the general proportions that @Mjx described during her blog in this post:  2 liters water, 500 g sugar, zest & juice of 3 limes (I may have used 4 or 5), 1 T or 15g citric acid. I followed the general instructions in David Lebovitz's Drinking French and brought the water, sugar, zest and juice to a boil, poured the hot mixture over the blossoms and let them sit for 3 days, stirring once a day.  The citric acid was added at the end by dissolving it in a small volume of the steeping liquid, then mixing everything together before straining into bottles. 

I put everything through a nut milk bag and squeezed it to extract as much liquid as possible.  I ended up with about 2.4 liters of cordial.  The spent flowers are in the beaker between the two liter bottles. 

I put ~ 1.5 oz into ~ 8 oz sparkling water and found it quite nice.  I'm happy with this level of sweetness.  

I have a batch of elderflower and prosecco popsicles in the freezer. 

 

 

[sverreef]

Elderflower season is fast approaching, so I just wanted to bring this thread back to hear what people make of their elderflowers, and how they do it.

 

Personally, I don't make cordial anymore, because I find that the addition of lemon and sugar limits possible usage. For the past couple of years, I've used the method and measurements from Nomas Guide to Fermentation to make my elderflower infusion:

 

(240 grams of sugar)

1760 grams of (boiling) water

300 grams of elderflowers

 

Soak overnight (I use 24 hours) in a stainless steel hotel pan or other suitable container. The first time I followed the Noma recipe, I also made a batch including the sugar, but I forget to factor in the increased boiling temperature of water with added sugar. This resulted in a brownish cordial/infusion. Flavour was also negatively impacted. I haven't tried with sugar syrup again, but water at 100 degrees Celsius doesn't seem to damage the flowers, so I assume sugar syrup at 100 degrees Celsius is OK as well.

 

The main reason I bumped the thread however, is to check if anyone has found an ingenious way/method to pick individual flowers from the flower heads? Although the use of boiling water should render the cyanogenic glycosides from stems harmless, I like to keep risks like this to an absolute minimum. For pickled elderflower, which quickly has become a favorite of ours, I consider individual flowers a must, so there I have no option.

 

It might be because I pick the flower heads a bit too early, but the amount of work it takes to clean 1kg of flowers is not something I look forward to...😳

 

Pickled elderflowers was a perfect match to this pan seared scallop at restaurant Lysverket in Bergen last summer by the way:

 

 

When I asked chef Christoffer Haatuft for the recipe, I also asked if he had any trick for destemming the flowers. Unfortunately, the restaurant used to buy 40 kilos of elderflowers from their supplier, which were already destemmed, so he had never had to think about an effective way to do this...