On Thursday morning before my intern arrived to do elderberries at 9AM, I went out and reweeded the walkways so my son could start the re-mulching. I also deadheaded and weeded the beds, but they didn’t need much.
When my intern got here we went out, but the birds hadn’t left us much. We picked what was left and went inside and popped the berries off the stems. We got 5.5 oz.
To make a simple unsweetened syrup, I added 22 oz of water to the berries, a 4:1 ratio. I brought them to a boil, then simmered them for 30 minutes.
I use buttercloth vs cheesecloth as I get far better results from it. I made a 4 ply cloth for straining the berries. We had tried a suggestion of putting the berries in a sieve and placing that in deep water. The idea was the stems and bad ones would float. No, they didn’t. So I was making sure I got them out of the liquid.
I wanted to try my Squeezo for pressing the pulp. But I thought it wise to drain off what liquid I could before I sent the seeds through the screen. If there was cyanide left in them, and they broke up, I wouldn’t lose all the liquid.
But it turns out the seeds are very tiny and they went through my medium Squeezo screen. I had placed an order for the berry screen and pumpkin screen over 2 years ago and have yet to receive them. But the good news is that the screw didn’t break them up, they went through whole, even though we sent the pulp through a few times.
The bowl with the ladle is the strained liquid and the other bowl is the liquid from the pulp. I put them both back in a pan and simmered them for 20 minutes until they had reduced by half.
This is how much was left. But we learned a lot of things about the process and I made a lot of notes. Most important one is to be ready around August 1st to harvest the berries, either by dehydrating them, freezing them, or processing them fresh into syrup.