Elderberry Jelly

Elderberries are a pretty common fruit throughout North America and one that isn't utilized nearly as much as it should be. I never gave the fruit any thought prior to this year. The fruit by itself is not really sweet at all and has a pungent taste that many people probably find off putting, but we were not after it for the raw fruit, but rather  for all the marvelous things it can be turned into! For our first elderberry experiment we decided to make jelly.

Elderberry bushes are usually found along riverbeds and roadsides, and we found plenty within 20 minutes of our house in Oceanside. The berries form in clusters on the bushes, and right now they are just loaded with berries. The clusters make the berries really easy to pick. The first bushes we stopped at did not have very many berries, but once we found some better ones, it took us only about ten minutes to fill two giant shopping bags. As this was our first time processing elderberries, we weren't really sure how much juice we would get out of the berries. Turns out it was a lot!

If picking the berries was the easy part, processing them was definitely the hard part. Elderberries are easy to harvest because you can just pull off one big clump at a time, but this means that when you get them home you have all the stems to remove. The berries come off pretty easily, but it is still very time consuming. You will also want to soak the berries because each cluster is a micro-ecosystem that is home to all kinds of little insects and spiders. You probably don't want that in your jelly.

Traditional jelly recipes instruct you to cook the fruit with water added, then strain the mixture through a "jelly bag to get a clear liquid that can then be turned into jelly. We decided to just use our juicer to get the juice out of the berries. I've never made jelly the traditional way so I can't say how the two methods would compare (except that this way seems easier) but I can say that it made delicious jelly. Using the juice maker does create a lot of foam, which would result in a jelly that isn't clear, so we poured it through cheesecloth a few times to remove any sediment.

Elderberries naturally don't contain very much pectin (this is what gives jelly it's form) so unless you are mixing it with another fruit that is naturally high in pectin, you will have to buy some at the store. Our jelly was  mostly elderberry with just a hint of Oregon Grape, which added color but didn't contribute much to the pectin content, so we used the packaged kind. I was surprised at how easy it was to make the jelly. Our basic recipe:

31/2 cups elderberry juice
Juice of 1 lemon (about 1/4 cup)
1 packet of pectin
4 cups sugar

Look at all this jelly!

The pectin was added gradually to the juice as it was heated on the stove-top. As soon as the juice began to boil, the sugar was added and stirred in and dissolved. Stirring was done continuously until the mixture began to foam. It was then stirred for 1 minute before the mixture was removed from the heat and poured into jelly jars. As soon as it cooled it was jelly! This single recipe yielded about 6 half-pint jars of jelly. These can be canned in order to seal them if they will not be used immediately or simply stored in the fridge.

We ended up with way more jelly than we expected to make, about 1 1/2 gallons in total! We made some personalized labels and gave a bunch of it away to family and friends.