Tuesday night....

Monday night my dad and mom delivered four buckets of elderberries for our crew of three to process on Tuesday for Midwinter's feast.  There will be syrup.  (Marian- I had a recommendation of using honey to make the syrup and it makes a really good cold remedy in hot drinks).  There maybe molasses and there will definately be juice.  We plucked about a gallon's volume of berries off the stems and it took three of us two hours to do so.  These will be made into tarts. Elderberries are tiny and very time intensive to pluck and clean.

On a side note...I always chuckle when I read blog posts about elderberry picking off the elderberry bushes.  West coast elderberries are TREES.  My parents' trees are probably 20+ feet tall- as tall as, or taller than, the two story house.  I stand on the shed roof to pick them often.

We forgot to take pictures of all four buckets before we started but this is what one bucket looks like. The whiter the berries, the more ripe they are.  There were a few that were neon green.  Those went into the trash bucket- green berries can be a little toxic (but not dangerous in small quantities).



Trudi  and Marian delicately picking berries of the tiny stems. You can see some of those green berries in Marian's tin.

You can see in this picture after about an hour, that tin in front of me doesn't really seem to have much in it.


We can throw the berries, stems and all, into the steam juicer which is much easier.  We've done this before and have discovered that large stems will make the juice bitter.  You can press the contents down just once mid process to squeeze out any juice in the berries but don't try a second time.  If the juice turns brown it's going to be bitter and astringent.

With just one pressing, it comes out a beautiful mulberry color.


The stems and spent berries are kind of ugly.

Look at that beautiful color!  It will need a lot of sweetener to make it palitable to the normal mouth as the juice is quite tart.  It makes excellent jellies and syrups.