Phil L wrote:
Sacha wrote:
In the very faint hope that we actually get some sun before the
Longest Day is upon us and it's all downhill towards Christmas,
I'm passing on a delicious recipe a friend gave me last year:
90 heads of Elder flower, picked at mid-day
6 sliced lemons
9lbs. Preserving sugar (Caster will do but Preserving is better)
7.5 oz. Citric or Tartaric acid
Put all the ingredients into a large bowl or clean plastic
bucket.
Add 7.5 pints boiling water.
Stir night and day for 5 days. Strain, squeezing the lemons.
Put
into plastic bottles and deep freeze. Take out only when wanted,
and refrigerate as it wonıt keep out of the freezer for more than
5 to 7 days.
Dilute with water to taste.
This makes a very refreshing drink in hot weater.
Undiluted, itıs also good on gooseberries or over fruit salad.
If you add a spoonfull of yeast it will also make a decent wine!
(if
you take away 7lbs of the sugar!)
Are you KIDDING? 90, read "ninety", like dude you mean, XC, figures
nine-uh zero I say again nine-uh zero, naw deg, neunzig,
quatre-vingts-dix, novanta, heads of elderflowers for two gallons of
wine? That will smell like three years' worth of cat pee soaked into
the carpet. About a pint of stripped elderflowers will flavour and
aromatise a gallon of strong sweet white wine for dessert use enough
to blow your socks off; I'd use max two heads for a gallon of
ordinary grape, whitecurrant, or gooseberry wine, and I wouldn't
leave them in very long, either. You don't apply the flowers till
_after_ the primary fermentation, whose bubbling would blow away most
of the aroma: pop them in there in a nylon stocking with a handful of
sterilized marbles (I know mine are.)
And modern preserving sugar is, indeed, inadvisable: the stuff
contains not so much citric acid as, if me soaked old grey cells do
not deceive me, pectin -- a sore destroyer of your wine's clarity,
and general irrelevancy to the domestic booze process. Use plain old
granulated cheapest: it's pure unwholesome C6H22O11 or something.
Check out my surname: we know this kind of shit in our family..
--
Mike.
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