How Can You Make Elderflower Syrup Yourself?

If you want to make elderflower syrup yourself, you need elderflower umbels, oranges, lemons, sugar, and citric acid. About two liters of elderflower syrup can be made from twelve large umbels of flowers, one orange, one lemon, 400 grams of cane sugar, and 25 grams of powdered citric acid.

Elderberry is in season between the beginning of June and the end of July. You can pick the flowers in the garden or in the great outdoors. Make sure the elderberry bushes aren’t too close to busy roads where they are exposed to harmful exhaust fumes. You should also avoid picking flowers that grow too low to the ground. They may have been contaminated by wild animals.

To obtain the syrup, first, pour out the flowers well to remove insects and dirt. If you want to wash the elderflowers, you should do this carefully in standing water so that as little as possible of the valuable, flavorful pollen is lost. Then drain the blossoms on kitchen paper and remove the coarse stalks with scissors, they contain bitter substances.

If you want to make elderflower syrup yourself, cut oranges and lemons (preferably with the untreated peel) into thin slices and place them in a large pot together with the cleaned elderflowers. The whole thing is then poured over two liters of boiling water. Weight the mixture down with a plate. Tin cans or a small pot are suitable for additional weight. Pressed in this way, the mixture for the elderflower syrup has to stand for two days. Stir the mass regularly.

If the syrup has been steeped long enough, it is sieved. To do this, line a sieve with kitchen paper and hang it in a suitable bowl. Also, prepare four half-liter glass bottles into which the homemade elderberry syrup will later be filled: Rinse the bottles and the caps with boiling water beforehand and let them drain upside down on a suitable surface.

Now the flower mixture is poured into the prepared sieve and squeezed out with a spoon. First, fill 250 milliliters of the resulting juice into a saucepan and boil it with the sugar while stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Now add the rest of the elderberry juice, add the citric acid to the syrup and let everything boil up again so that the juice can be preserved. The homemade elderflower syrup can now be filled into the prepared bottles through a funnel, where it should keep well chilled for about six months.

Homemade elderflower syrup mixed with sparkling mineral water in a ratio of 1:4 tastes particularly good. But sparkling wine or prosecco is also well suited for a mixed drink with elderflower syrup, such as “Hugo”.