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Photo by Holly A. Heyser
I can’t believe I’ve never written about elderberry syrup. It’s the first thing I do with elderberries once they come ripe in summer. Why? Because it’s so damn versatile. I’ve used it to make elderberry ice cream, poured it on top of other ice creams, alongside lemon verbena panna cotta, and it is a mainstay of my go-to sauce for venison and wild duck, the classic Cumberland sauce.
I guess I never wrote about it because it was pretty intuitive. I mean, all you need are elderberries and sugar, right?
Well, yes. But when I described to some friends my method of making this syrup, I realized it’s actually different from most. Most syrup recipes ask that you cook your elderberries, mash them with a potato masher and let them drain through a jelly bag. Well, there is a problem with this. You will never break all the berries with this method, and given that it is a time-consuming and persnickety business to take all those elderberries off their stems — the stems are toxic, by the way – you really want as much juice as you can get.
So instead, I use an immersion blender and a food mill to make short work of our little blue friends.
Photo by Hank Shaw
Works so well you can get twice as much yield from your elderberries. Twice, you say? Yes, twice. Most elderberry syrup recipes require you to add water to your boiling berries. Shame! Watering down that elderberry goodness! I suppose it works fine, but you don’t have to water down your berries to make a sufficient amount of syrup — unless you are in a serious drought. Use my method and you will get 3+ pints from 3 pounds of elderberries, as opposed to 2 pints from 2 pounds of elderberries with another 2-4 cups of water thrown in. Believe me, this is a huge flavor difference.
What does 3 pounds of elderberries look like? Well, like this:
Photo by Hank Shaw
When they are on their stems, it is roughly equivalent to half a paper grocery bag. On a good year, that can take you all of 10 minutes to harvest. Destemming, however, will take an hour — if you are good at it.
Why make elderberry syrup? Uh, why not? Aside from ice cream, wild game sauces, etc, you can use elderberry syrup:
- As a sorbet base
- In an Italian fruit mustard, a/k/a mostarda
- As a flavoring for panna cotta or creme caramel
- In a martini
- As flavor for an Italian soda
- On your pancakes
The possibilities are pretty endless. And since elderberries grow in most of the 50 states, as well as in Canada and most of Europe, there’s no reason you can’t go outside and get some yourself.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
elderberry syrup
You will need at least a pound of elderberries for this recipe, and preferably three pounds, so you have enough to last a while. I use a food mill to extract as much juice as I can from the berries, but if you don’t have one you can use a jelly bag. I am pretty cavalier about my canning practices with syrups, as they are so sugar-dense they are incredibly resistant to bacteria. I don’t bother to sterilize my equipment, although I do make sure everything is freshly cleaned, and I do use a brand-new canning lid. If you feel the need to process your syrup in a boiling-water bath, 10 minutes will be more than enough.
Makes 3 pints.
Prep Time: 1 hour
Cook Time: 20 minutes
- 3 pounds elderberries, destemmed
- 4 cups sugar
- You will need to remove the berries from the stems; elderberry stems are toxic. (I go through some tricks on destemming elderberries here.) It should take you about 45 minutes to an hour to destem 3 pounds of elderberries, which equates to about a half a normal paper grocery bag.
- At this point you can empty your berries into a large bowl of ice water. Weird debris will float, like dead flower husks, bugs, etc. Pour this off.
- Pour the elderberries into a large pot and either mash them thoroughly with a potato masher, or, better yet, with an immersion blender. Only break up the berries for a few seconds using the immersion blender, and use it on low setting. You don’t want to grind up the seeds, which are bitter.
- Bring the elderberries to a boil, stirring often. Now, if you are using a food mill, set it up with its finest plate and pour the elderberries into it. Run the food mill until the mash is pretty dry, then squeeze out any remaining elderberry juice. You should have a little more than 1 quart. If you are using the jelly bag method. Mash the berries again after they’ve boiled, then pour them into a jelly bag suspended over a large bowl. Let this drain for 1 hour. You should have a little less than 1 quart.
- If you are using the food mill, pour the juice through your finest mesh sieve to catch any stray seeds or pulp. You don’t need to do this with the jelly bag method.
- Return the juice to the (cleaned) pot and add an equal volume of sugar, normally about 4 cups. Bring to a boil until it froths, then turn off the heat and pour into clean jars. Always use a new canning lid when you are making this syrup, unless you plan on eating it in the next few weeks. Seal the jars and let stand until the lids pop. They will keep for a year on the shelf or in the fridge.
More Recipes for Sweets and Syrups
MORE ELDERBERRY RECIPES
- Elderberry Creme Fraiche Ice Cream
- Pontack, an ancient elderberry sauce
- Elderberry Liqueur
- Mini Berry Pies
Now that I’ve got to try. It’ll be a while on this side of the pond before the berries are ready – just finished racking the elder flower wine.
Regards,
John
My father smelled of elderberries…..
Aside from them being plentiful and delicious they are incredibly medicinal. A couple of teaspoons throughout the day when you are feeling the symptoms of a cold can help immensely.
My favorite is on vanilla ice cream though. I made a balsamic elderberry reduction on a whim once that was great with pork….maybe I should get around to making some for myslef instead of raiding our medicine cabinet.
Excited for my elder flower liquer! Shook it for the first time two weeks ago. Used Grappa! I’ll have to try this next.
I was walking the dog and found what I thought to be an elderflower bush by the pond. The berry tasted terrible but looked right… is there something nasty that looks like it? Trying to get a good picture of a leaf on line to see if I have the right thing because I love elderberry jam and would like to make it. Does it have a horrible bitter taste?
I’m sorry to say I have made elderberry syrup the last three years and no one in my family will use it be me. : ( I use it particularly throughout flu season in my morning filmjölk (a Swedish soured milk, kind of like yogurt) with muesli since elderberries are supposedly excellent at curbing the flu and miniminzing recovery time. Maybe I’ll give it one more shot this year with your recipe. I’m also really keen on trying your elderberry ice cream recipe. Thank you for the post.
Hey Hank,
Thanks for this recipe! I am always looking for different ways to use elderberries. Not only are they great for fighting the flu but they also lower cholesterol, improve vision, boost the immune system, improve heart health and are great for coughs, colds, bacterial and viral infections and tonsilitis. Mangiare!
-me
Hank,
Do you ever use red elderberries for this recipe? Or any other recipe… they are all over the place on the central coast of Oregon right now and lots of people have asked me… thanks.
Thanks for the recipes. I cant wait for our elderberries to get ripe enough to use. I am from Europe, so it´ll take some time.
I’ve got my eye on a huge amount of berries. Made this last year using a food mill but I’ll try an immersion blender this time and see how it goes. Time to pull out clothes to wear when processing items that stain!
JR: DEFINITELY make some yourself – it is about 300x cheaper than using that Sambucol syrup you buy in the store. Nothing beats free…
Deana: No, whatever you tried was NOT elderberry. Elderberry is sweet and tart, not bitter. Just Google “blue elderberries” or click on the link above for destemming elderberries – that has a good image of what they look like.
Maia: Just tell your family its a sweet syrup for pancakes or whatever. If you don’t tell them it is medicinal, they’ll never notice.
OregonCoastGardener: Nope, never use red elderberries. They are at best nasty, at worst toxic, depending on who you ask. Either way, they are not good eats. Stick with the blue elderberries.
Hi Hank,
Love reading your blog and look forward to trying out this method for making elderberry syrup. Would love if you could do a piece on mindful foraging and how it is not nice to park and/or forage from “posted” private property , especially when the homeowner has asked them not to (this is for the two gals driving the silver mini van parked on my property, using a red wagon, foraging elderberries from the trail yesterday, and fruits/vegs from the adjacent farms!).
Thanks! Carolyn from Southport (West Sacramento, CA).
Wow, do I love this site! You are my kinda people.
Last winter I made an elderberry syrup with honey to ward off the winter nasties. It was too late for fresh berries but boiling dried ones worked great. Either the nasties didnt get close to me or this worked.
Incredibly healthy syrup and this year I have my own bees to provide the honey.
You should also look at making the elderflower syrup or cordial. It is truly delicious and reminds me of spring.
Tom: I’ve made elderflower syrup for years!
Do you think you can use a blender or vitamix for this? I have been making elderberry syrup for 3 years now with the 2 huge bushes in my yard but it is soooo time consuming to strain and pop them all! I would appreciate any input on this. I do not own an immersion blender and I make a ton of this stuff and give it to family members to keep them healthy all winter!
Thanks!
Adriann: Yes, you can use a Vitamix, blender of food processor, but be very careful about over processing — you don’t want to crush the seeds, which are bitter. Maybe try just a couple pulses rather than letting the blender go full blast.
De stemming is not that difficult if you flick them off the stems with a fork
as advised in other sites. In uk the berries are dark red not blue
Best not to use blender as they boil down once you have pulled berries
off the stems. Cut from bush at the thicker stems to hold all the stems on
the bunch together before discarding them together. Happy berrying!
Hank, awesome site! Elderberry syrup is on my list. I have been making Gooserry Jam and wanted to do something with Elerberries too. Thanks for the info.. Now off to get some doves tomorrow.
Hi! How much if you convert 3 pounds of elderberries to cups? Same proportions if I use honey instead of sugar? Thanks a lot!
Cheryl: No idea, sorry! But honey tends to be sweeter than sugar, so I’d start with a 2/3 ratio and go from there. Remember honey has its own flavor, too, so you will not have a pure elderberry flavor in this syrup.
Hi – just wanted to say your post for elderberry syrup is beautiful and it inspired me to look past the ripening glut of tomatoes that need processing to a bush (cultivated not wild) in the back garden brimming with ripe berries (I’m in Canada at the eastern tip of Lake Ontario). So I picked some and used the tines of a fork to gently rake the berries from the stems – worked well and was able to de stem in a half hour. Your book is at the top of my wish list and so shortly will be on my kitchen counter. Best of luck with your book tour.
Don’t know if you can find piloncillo in your local South-of-the-Border grocery store, but, MY, MY! what a taste treat of healthy sweets! For some of the best ever rhubarb sauce, berry syrups, marmalades, and whatever else calls for loads of sweetness, piloncillo is impossible to be beat! If it’s still not totally sweet enough, I also add a few pinches of Stivita brand stevia, but usually, just the piloncillo is sufficient.
Today, along with the smoked salmon back I made soup stock and salad bits from, I put fresh-picked rasp and wild blackberries in a sauce pan – no added water – and a small cone of solid piloncillo [Pilopncillo is solidified, dehydrated raw sugar cane juice], and ft it to simmer at tthe lowest possible heat for about four hours. The berry juice separated, and the gentle heat and liquid dissolved the piloncillo cone, and I finished it with a couple of tablespoons of corn starch, after thoroughly breaking all the berry kernels.
Yummy!
My 11 year old kid’s teacher has asked me to come up with edible wild foods for the 5th graders at various seasons this year. I am thinking of making elderberry
syrup to start. There are lots of elderberries around here in Sac–but are they still good to eat this late in the season?
We have an elderberry tree in our front yard, just discovered last year. We used a steamer/juicer and made elderberry jelly. It’s wonderful. I would like to try your syrup recipe. I love using the steamer/juicer rather than going through the process of cooking, mashing, putting them through a food mill. Would I use the same ratio of juice to sugar that you have in your recipe if I did it this way? Thank you.
Alex: Sorry for the late reply, but yeah, they would have been good in early September. Now you will need to head into the high Sierra to get them. Look about 4-6000 feet right now.
Korri: Well, I have not idea. But I imagine if you follow your jelly recipe and then skip the pectin, you will be fine. Let me know how it turns out!
I really like your post on Elderberry Syrup. I just finished making 5 quarts of syrup from another recipe and I can see it’s real runny. I still have some in my freezer so will try your recipe with those. I also steam juice and recently put up 60 quarts. It has taken me 2 wks to get to this point. Last yr. I just gently pulled the berries off the stems but this yr. I took cookie sheets and large ss bowls and filled with berries then put in freezer for at least 4 hrs. Large bowls take over night. Rub between hands or with fingers and they fall right off. I have a fetish for elderberries and is hard for me to pass up any but I think I’m at my limit. All total, with my husbands help, we picked (6) 5 gal. buckets full. I also dried some in my solar dryer and they are really sweet. I’m anxious to try your recipe.
Thanks for the elderberry recipes on this site, and usage suggestions. I just picked a ton of the berries a few days ago (two 13-gallon garbage bags each about 1/3 third full of berry bunches). This is my second year of dealing with elderberries. The easiest way I found to de-stem them last year is to throw the bags of berries into the deep freeze for a day or so. When I am ready to deal with them I take out a big bunch of them, put them into another plastic bag, and smack them against a table top or the kitchen counter top. Most of the berries fall off the stems into the bag. Then I dump them onto a jelly-roll pan and it is easy to scoop off piles of berries while leaving little and big twigs behind. I put the cleaned berries in another bag and into the freezer while I work on the rest of the remaining frozen berry bunches. It still takes time, but this way is not as fussy as trying to pick all the little stems off the berries when fresh. (I tried using a fork as many have recommended but got impatient.) After finishing the whole batch, I weighed out 3 pounds and put them into a large stockpot to simmer out the juices and followed a recipe for jelly. I will try the immersion blender technique/food mill this year. Thanks for the tip.
Beautiful and well managed WordPress blog. Thank you for the interesting Elderberry Sirup recipe. Just recently my wife and I were learning a lot about the great health benefits of the elderberry, and started to make some research. We were looking for one for a while, but this is the one we like the best. I’ve been growing and selling Elderberry plants for a long time in my Nursery, but I never had the time to look deeper to it’s nutritional and health properties that this amazing plant has. But now we know.
Thanks once again for making it available.
Mike
[...] equally medicinal to the dark berries of the late summer. My favorite source of recipes is from Hunter Adler Gardener Cook – like his Elderberry Syrup, Pontack (an ancient Elderberry Sauce for game), and Elderberry [...]
well if you get a fruit steamer you don’t have to worry about de-stemming the fruit.
[...] syrup with the berries from the bush in the photo above (the big bush on the left). I used this recipe and method as a guide, except I used my Breville juicer to juice the berries. It was awesome by the way, and [...]
I have made elderberry syrup for years. The branches are not toxic!! I cut the branches just above the berries. Rinse, put all in the juicer..Add sugar to the juice, slow boil for an hour. pour into pint jars and seal. I can’t keep it. The whole family loves it.
Thank you so much for the recipe and tips! Here in northern CA, I planted three bushes a few years ago, and am now reaping the rewards. Frozen berry destemming works great, too! The berries hold up w/o losing much juice.
Oh yeah, elderberry syrup (w/ some sweetener) with champagne makes a great kir royale. Just saying, for all the food snobs out there.
I could NOT find my food mill, so i used a coffee press for the half batch i cooked up this morning.
I made this syrup and it turned out great! I have been able to make two batches of elderberry jelly and 7 jars of syrup all from one bounteous elderberry bush we found while out 4 wheeling.
I can not believe I haven’t found you before now! great site! Caveman hubby just came home with about 2 gallons of elderberries and even cleaned them all! So I was like….”What do I do with elderberries???” I’m going to make this syrup and pork loin and elderberry chutney and… sky’s the limit. Thanks for the recipe!
[...] to make my syrup. 5 Orange Potatoes uses one based on Rosemary Gladstar’s recipe and here is Hank Shaw’s recipe for a purely culinary Elderberry Syrup. Finally, here is Susun Weed’s take on the Wise Woman [...]
I make elderberry jam, not syrup, using 50% sugar and pectin. I find that a bit of lemon juice improves the taste. With whole berries I think it tastes best if the elderberries are less than half of the fruit, the rest being whatever I have available: strawberries, black currants, bird cherries, or cranberries. With filtered juice, the pure elderberry jam is good, but I still like to add a bit of lemon. Thanks for the ideas about frozen destemming and pre-blending the berries.
Um, are you sure you want to blend them? I know someone who gave himself cyanide poisoning by throwing frozen elderberries into a vitamix. Since we don’t know if they were cooked or frozen previously it’s been a practice to avoid excessively mashing the seeds.
Ash: Absolutely. Two things: First, this is a cooked syrup. Any cyanide in the seeds — which isn’t much with blue elder — is rendered harmless by cooking. Second, if you read the recipe closely, you will see I use an immersion blender, not a regular blender, and certainly not a Vitamix. There is no way an immersion blender is going to break elderberry seeds.
We also use blender, and then strain the mix through a sieve. We freeze the berries first and then they come off the stems lickedy split. I do need a slightly finer sieve to get the smallest seeds; until I get it I have to run it through a jelly bag.
[...] yummy was a few teaspoons of elderberry (Sambucus spp.) syrup that I made this summer (using Hank Shaw’s excellent instructions), some grated fresh ginger, and a slice of lemon. homemade elderberry [...]
Like your site – here in the UK been making elderberry syrup for years, I agree with Marketa, the stems are not toxic if cooked in the small amounts that you leave on. I take off as much stem as I can but cook the berries on the fine stems if necessary. Its the raw berries that are mildly toxic and can cause stomach upsets in adults.
[...] ways to remove the stems of flowers for elderflower fritters or effective removal of the stems of ripe berries by freezing them for such lovely delicacies as elderberry syrup. You’ll also need to know that there are [...]