Edible flowers are terribly exciting and trendy at the moment. A dash of green alkanet in your salad, or some fried courgette flowers are great fun. But even this takes second place to making your own bubbly from the fat white disk-like elderflowers which are popping open in English hedgerows. Once you find a bush in bloom, it should take you only a few minutes to pick enough flowerheads for a couple of bottles.
Ingredients:
4 litres water
2 and a half cups caster sugar
8 heads of elderflowers
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 lemons
- Bring the water to the boil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, and dissolve the sugar in it. Leave to cool.
- Wash the elderflower heads and remove any large bits of stalk.
- Juice one of the lemons, and cut the second into fine slices.
- Add the flowerheads, the lemon slices and juice and the white wine vinegar to the mix.
- Cover with a slightly damp, clean teatowel, and leave at room temperature for two days. If the mixture is not fermenting (foaming a little and smelling rather happy), then add a pinch of fast-action dried yeast, and leave for another three days to coax it along.
- Crush the flower heads with a potato masher to release more of the flavour, and strain through a fine sieve.
- Decant into screw-top bottles, leave for two weeks, before quaffing it, chilled.
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bobbie john stringer
I have made my first batch of elderflower champagne and just bottled it. The only thing I think I have done wrong is put in the pith of the lemon to make it more cloudy and bitter. It taste fab before bottling it and the fizz is already building up nicely and I am relieving the pressure when built up. the only thing that is bothering me is there is a slight smell of egg in the gas when I open it. Is this just methane mixed in with the co2 from the fermentation of the natural yeasts and sugar?? It is worrying me as I have my next batch in (minus the pith of the lemon and dont want to find i am doing something wrong. any help or advice would be appreciated. many thanks,
Bobbie