SPRING REPORT #13.2

Edibles from the forest: refreshing tea with elderberry flowers

Elderberry, a.k.a. Sambucus, or Sauco in Spanish and Sureau in French, is a tree native to most of Europe that blooms abundantly in late spring and early summer all around here, with flowers that emanate a delicious sweet fragrance, especially during the morning and evening:

The scent produced by Sambucus trees all around my neighborhood and the nearby forest is much like that of pseudoacacias; in fact they flower at the same time so the air feels very fresh and sweet everywhere:

But both flowers and fruits are edible in Sambucus, at least of the nigra species and when cooked. You can know more about this tree, the culinary uses of its flowers, the toxicity of some components, and more in the Wikipedia entry:

A refreshing beverage with Elderberry flowers

Elderberry flowers can be infused with sugar and lemon to prepare a very refreshing drink. Actually, it’s a very sweet “nectar” (syrop) with the taste of the flower, that you will dilute in water upon consumption.

The recipe is very simple. Simply collect a good amount of flowers, making sure they have no insects and that they are very clean -this is critical because you won’t wash them! That is, we want flowers that look very clean, like here on the left, and not at all with bugs as in this plant on the right:

So, remove all the green parts (very important because they don’t taste well) and place the flowers in a pot with a good amount of sugar (roughly 1:1 to the volume of flowers). Add some lemon juice and heat up until the mixture boils, stirring constantly. Do not boil for more than 2–3 minutes.

Then let the mixture cool down overnight, and the next day filter it into the containers for storage. At this stage I like to add some more lemon to the solution. And usually, I place some of the beverage in a flask for immediate consumption and I freeze the rest inside bottles for consumption later on throughout the year. For example, here I got around 750 ml that I split in 250 for immediate consumption and 500 for longer-term conservation:

When you are filtering out the solution, you may also want to squeeze the most flavor out of the flowers:

The best way to drink it

On the hot summer days, you take out the nectar and dilute with cold water plus some freshly squeezed lemon if you fancy:

And voila! Enjoy!

Even simpler: adding Elderberry flowers to black ice tea

Plus lemon and quite a bit of sugar, it is ready to be enjoyed on a hot day:

More edibles from the forest

A resemblance?

While I was preparing this batch of elderberry syrop, some flowers fell onto the kitchen’s blackglass. I couldn’t help comparing them with snowflakes! They even have hexagonal symmetry!

The photographs of snowflakes are also mine, from these two stories that you may like:

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