Recipe: How to make sparkling elderflower cordial (2024)

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Sparkling elderflower cordial is a simple recipe that lets biology do the “cooking,” while dazzling your taste buds with bubbly deliciousness. In this article, you’ll find out how to make it!

Each year in late spring (usually between the last week of May and the first week of June in our area), a brief two week window of time opens, wherein one of the world’s most delightful culinary treats presents itself for harvest: elderflowers.

Elderflowers are the clusters of delicate white flowers adorning elderberry plants, a large shrub/small tree that thrives in temperate regions around the world. Ripe elderberries are also a prized food and medicinal crop.

We use our cultivated elderberries to make elderberry syrup. Interestingly, research has shown that elderberries boost the immune system and make a potent weapon against the cold, flu, and other viral pathogens.

How to harvest and process elderflowers

To make sparkling elderflower cordial, you’ll need to get elderflowers then remove them from the stems and pedicels.

Step 1: Grow your own or identify wild elderberry plants to source elderflowers.

We have five large, mature elderberry plants growing in our yard, and within a few miles of our house, there are dozens of other wild elderberry plants growing. If elderberry plants are native to where you live (they likely are) and you know how to ID them, you’ll see elderberry plants everywhere while they’re in bloom.

However, even without foraging the wild plants growing nearby, our five elderberry plants produce more than enough flowers and berries to last us the year without negatively impacting fruit production.

Step 2: Remove whole flower clusters when flowers are open but still bright white.

We harvest whole flower heads when the tiny star-shaped flowers are still bright white, since the flavor is at peak during this stage. Once the flowers have turned tan/brown, they won’t contain the nectar and pollen to produce their famous, delicate flavor.

We cut whole flower heads off of the plant in the early morning before our pollinators have had a chance to forage their pollen and nectar. Obviously, this means those branches won’t be able to produce berries, so we only take as many flower heads as we need.

Also, we only remove flowers from branches on the outermost branches that would be likely to snap under the full weight of a ripening berry cluster (their branches are quite brittle). We leave the flowers on the strongest, most upright branches for a berry harvest, allowing us to maximize the full benefits of the plant.

When harvesting, we’ll place the flower heads in large 5 gallon buckets or a woven harvest basket. We can harvest all the elderflowers we need for the year in about 30 minutes.

Step 3: The hard part – removing all the flowers from the stems/pedicels.

Once harvested, we immediately bring the flower clusters inside to be removed from the stems by hand. This is by far the most laborious part of the process.

It should take one person an hour or less to strip four cups of elderflowers from their stems. We don’t know of any easy way to do it – we just swipe down the stems towards the flowers with our fingertips repeatedly until all the flowers are removed.

Oh, and since each elderberry plant and flower cluster is its own ecosystem, you will encounter some tiny insects during this process. That’s ok. Put them back outside.

Worst case scenario is a few tiny insects become part of your sparkling elderflower cordial, which isn’t a problem. You already eat about 2 pounds of insects every year, so a few more won’t hurt you.

If insects really bother you, you can also make this recipe using these dried organic elderflowers that someone else already processed.

How to make sparkling elderflower cordial

Sparkling elderflower cordial achieves its delightful bubbles via a natural fermentation process. Thebeneficial microbes you harness in the process (primarily native yeasts and bacteria on the elderflowers) create the magic for you, similar to the beer and wine-making process.

Sparkling elderflower cordial makes a delightful, lightly alcoholic disgestif (probably no more than 2-3% alcohol) to sip after a meal or just because you want to. Of course, before serving, you can also fortify your sparkling elderflower cordial with a non-flavored, colorless spirit like vodka to make it more akin to the famous St-Germain elderflower liqueur made in France.

Here’s the simple recipe we’ve developed to make our sparkling elderflower cordial:

We hope you enjoy this recipe for years to come! If you want to grow your own elderberry plants for flower and berry harvests, you can buy them here.

KIGI,

Dive deeper into elderberries with these related articles:

• Recipe: elderflower kombucha
• How to make elderberry syrup
• Complete guide to growing elderberries
• Recipe: Raspberry-elderflower-honey sparkling cordial