Elderberry Jelly
Ingredients
3 cups elderberry juice (from 11-12 cups stemmed elderberries cooked with 1/2 cup water)
1/4 cup lemon juice
4 & 1/2 cups sugar
1 box pectin
Directions:
- make the juice by cooking the stemmed elderberries with a bit of water. About 5 minutes simmering should break them apart and then strain them through a jelly bag. Measure the collected juice and you should get about 3 cups. If you need to, add some water to get to the 3 cups you need for the recipe.
- Prepare your water bath canner
- Place the elderberry juice in a jam pot with the lemon juice and pectin. Stir to dissolve the pectin
- Turn the heat on and bring it up to a boil. Boil for 1 minutes.
- Add the sugar, stirring to incorporate and return the pot to a boil. Boil hard for 1 minute.
- Remove from heat and ladle into prepared jars, leaving a 1/4 inch head space.
- Place the lids and rims onto jars and process in the water bath canner for 10 minutes.
- Once done, pull from the canner and let it cool on the counter for 24 hours.
This was a recipe that I turned to this year to get all of the elderberries I could but use them in a different way. For the last two years, I have been fortunate to being able to dry lots of elderberries for later use. But now Im at a point of having an overwhelming amount of dried berries that I didn’t need more. Now next year, I may need to restock that stash but this year, I really didn’t need to get close to doing so. Im also planning for next year to get the flowers from the elderberry as I could use the flowers more too for the apothecary.
There is obviously health benefits to eating elderberry jam but it does have sugar, so im not personally looking at this for medicinal purposes. I personally am using this because I truly was curious if we would like the taste of it. I may next year try making an elderberry syrup but for coffee not the medical kind. So think like chocolate or strawberry syrup but elderberry. I think that would be a nice change and use of the berries. So we actually have a few different ideas coming up for next year. I will just need to have a big harvest then!!!!