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Elderflower Cordial Recipe

Description​

Elderflower Cordial what a Swedish tradition. Cordial might not be the right word but this is an English page not a Swedish page. For the Swedish speakers or those who want a good search term to go raiding Swedish pages with using the quite decent machine translations out there it called Flädersaft in Swedish.

Ingredients​

These will be annotated per "batch". Cat commonly makes these in sets of 2 at a time though.

  • 1500 grams of sugar
  • 1500 grams of water
  • 50 grams of Citric Acid
  • 250 grams of Elderflowers. Harvested according to instructions.
  • 2-3 Lemons according to taste and size.

I measure the water by weight because I already have the scales out when I make this as our sugar comes in 2kg packs and when making a double I’m not buying 1 2kg and 1 1kg pack just to make it 0 measure. Table sugar is something that gets consumed so don’t waste the money on getting 3kg pre measured if yours comes in 2kg standard like mine does.

Procedure​

When I make the double batch if I am brave and fucking stupid, I like to follow the procedure of half the water and all the sugar and boil that until dissolved. If you are making a double batch like Cat commonly, does you likely cant fit the litres of liquid this makes in a single pot safely with PLENTY of margin to the top for safety. This shit is hot sugar water after all. Sticky boiling shit is worth your respect.

To the sugar I also add the citric acid and boil it to dissolve.

The reason we boil all this is has to do with microbe management and extraction not to break the sugar as far as I know. As in you don’t need to boil it for any real time you just get it boiling. This stuff is quite naturally resistant to spoiling compared to other cordials I have exposure to. This shit can spoil ofc but it’s very easy to succeed if you follow the steps.

Before you boil your sugar solution if you’re doing this alone you prepare your elder flowers and lemons. If you want to drag your mandolin slicer out of its hiding place, feel free to use it to turn your lemons into paper. Surface area helps extract more flavour.

Using your preferred method of turning your lemons into as thin slices as you can reasonably manage with thinner being better turn your lemons into slices and throw them in a heat-resistant vessel together with your elder flowers. Personally, I don’t trim them to only flowers and actually keep a lot of the wood. Like ofc remove a as much as is reasonable but like that you do during harvest not now.

This heat proof container needs to be able to sit with a slightly acidic sugar mixture and elder for 3 days straight preferably in a dark and cool environment.

So, you have your container large enough to contain your elder flower and sugar water mixture. just poor the boiled sugar solution into the container with the flowers and add a lid and something to press the flower mixture down like a plate. The lid can be an improvised lid made out of plastic wrap it doesn’t have to be perfect. Mine certainty isn’t when I make this shit and it works it just has to be decent.

Let your mixture sit for 3 days straight and once 72 hours is up you decant to another container thru a filter. Cheese cloth probably works for this. Here in Sweden, we use something similar it’s just a purpose made jig and filters. Since well cordial making is a national pass time of the past at least so a lot of us have this equipment. Squeeze the ball of plant matter that the filter caught once you think it’s not going to give up more of that liquid on its own to get out every last drop.

Congratulations you now just have to bottle this product in a bunch of bottles and freeze it. Frozen this keeps for a year easily (I would know I have last years batch in my freezer still. Because I made a LOT of this stuff last year) and thaw on demand as this stuff can go bad in your fridge. You can use preservatives if you want to add even more resistance to fungi. A popular one is E211 Sodium benzoate. It’s sold in every grocery store here in Sweden that’s how common it is to make jams and cordial here that even my local small grocery store sells this and pure pectin.

End Result​

Well, the end result of this is cordial and well if you make it with more citric acid, you can even get something that is supposedly good at mixing with liquor for drinks. I found that out when I tried to compensate for too few lemons with extra citric acid while making a triple batch last year.

Alternative Recipes​

So, this recipe got changed because Cats most recent batch was done with 1 counted flowers and 2 actually a lot more flowers than usual. So, I will say that an alternative recipe is to halve the flowers per batch. As in the old Recipe Cat had done last year was half flowers this year Cat did it correctly and got to full flowers when Cat used a scale and counted 30 flowers. Tbh some of the flowers were huge.