Elderflowers lend a fragrant and floral flavour to beverages, and a small bottle of elderflower cordial is often priced over $20 in stores. If you forage the flowers fresh around the end of July, you can make your own! And it's really easy.
Canada elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) shrubs are pretty common on roadsides or forest edges around a lot of Eastern Canada and the Northeastern United Sates, so they are easy to find. As always, be certain about your plant identification before consuming any wild plants. Of course you can pick the berries later in the season as well, so by picking flowers at this stage for recipes you are sacrificing some berries later.
Elderflower Cordial Recipe
You will need:
- 20-25 elderflower heads
- 1 litre of water
- 2-3 cups of sugar (depending on your sweet tooth)
- The zest of two lemons
- The juice of two lemons
*You can use one large orange in place of lemons if preferred
Cut elderflower heads when freshly opened and some still closed in the centre. They can often be found on roadsides in late July.
Snip off the flowers from the stalks into a large bowl or jar that will hold everything. Try to remove as much of the stems as you can. A few stray bits of stems will not hurt you, but minimize it as much as possible.
Add the lemon or orange zest into a bowl with the flower heads, and bring 1L of water to a boil. Pour boiled water over the flower heads and zest, and leave it to infuse for around 12 hours.
Strain it into a pot through a mesh strainer lined with cheese cloth or a coffee filter. Add sugar and lemon juice, and bring to a boil stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Let the syrup cool then use a funnel to pour into swing-top bottles or jars.
Optionally you can leave your bottles out at room temperature for 3 days to develop some carbonation.
Store the cordial in the fridge. To serve, pour 1 to 3 tablespoons of the syrup into a pint glass and add water or seltzer. Or you can add to a vodka or gin cocktail.
There are several different approaches to preparing cordials or syrups like this one, but I find that steeping or infusing the flower heads in just water before adding the sugar and citrus juice results in a better flavour. However some people prefer fermenting the mixture right at the start by adding the sugar at the beginning, it all comes down to preference.
Try it and let us know what you think!
