Elderflower Champagne
Well we bottled the elderflower champagne last night. There's various conflicting recipes for this so it's definitely an experiment on our part. Here's what we've done;
On sunday morning we picked a bunch of elderflower heads, taken from positions facing the sun. Theory is that the heads smell like bananas earlier in the day and cat/dog pee later!
Into a 10 litre bucket we poured 1.5 litres of boiling water and 1 kilo of sugar. Then topped with cold water to 10 litres. We added 8 elderflower heads (6 larger, 2 smaller), 3 lemons- halfed and the juice squeezed in, then the shells dropped in too. And finally 4 tblsp white wine vinegar.
This was covered with a tea towel, stirred occasionally and left for 24 hours. The recipe we were following said to bottle then, but having read other recipes (mainly the river cottage one) we decided to mix in a pinch and a half of yeast and leave for another day.
That took us to last night, so we sterilsed 10 litres of plastic pop bottle and poured in the juice, strained through a muslin and a sieve. They're now stored in the shed, i'll be checking the pressure on them to see how it develops.
We did find conflicting recipes, the river cottage being most controversial. HFW uses 24-30 heads of elderflowers for 10 litres, ferments for 4-5 days and then checks for yeasty development. I may have to try his in the future for comparison.
We decided to add yeast mainly because i feel that as the flowers are still early, their yeast capabilities might not be at their fullest. I've no scientific evidence for this, just a hunch!
Anyway it's time to play the waiting game before trying out the bubbly!
On sunday morning we picked a bunch of elderflower heads, taken from positions facing the sun. Theory is that the heads smell like bananas earlier in the day and cat/dog pee later!
Into a 10 litre bucket we poured 1.5 litres of boiling water and 1 kilo of sugar. Then topped with cold water to 10 litres. We added 8 elderflower heads (6 larger, 2 smaller), 3 lemons- halfed and the juice squeezed in, then the shells dropped in too. And finally 4 tblsp white wine vinegar.
This was covered with a tea towel, stirred occasionally and left for 24 hours. The recipe we were following said to bottle then, but having read other recipes (mainly the river cottage one) we decided to mix in a pinch and a half of yeast and leave for another day.
That took us to last night, so we sterilsed 10 litres of plastic pop bottle and poured in the juice, strained through a muslin and a sieve. They're now stored in the shed, i'll be checking the pressure on them to see how it develops.
We did find conflicting recipes, the river cottage being most controversial. HFW uses 24-30 heads of elderflowers for 10 litres, ferments for 4-5 days and then checks for yeasty development. I may have to try his in the future for comparison.
We decided to add yeast mainly because i feel that as the flowers are still early, their yeast capabilities might not be at their fullest. I've no scientific evidence for this, just a hunch!
Anyway it's time to play the waiting game before trying out the bubbly!
posted by Garry at 8:52 am
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