Elderberry Or Look-alike?

hi this is rachel klosky from cooking with mrs g and today we're going to learn how to identify harvest and process elderberries identifying elderberry can be difficult for some beginners so here is dogwood as you can see the little green berries and the flowers when the flowers are in season can look extremely similar to elderberry but the big difference here is in the leaves dogwood leaves are a simple leaf as you can see here is the leaf stock and one simple leaf with a smooth edge is on the dogwood however here is an elderberry bush here is the leaf stock on the elderberry bush one leaf stalk then gives way too many leaflets and each leaflet on the elderberry bush has a serrated edge to it not a smooth edge you can see it looks like the edge of the leaf looks like a serrated knife it's not a smooth edge and there are many leaflets coming off of one leaf stalk so once you notice that the dogwood has one simple leaf with a smooth edge and the elderberry has a compound leaf with many leaflets and each one of the leaflets is serrated then it's pretty easy to be able to tell the difference between silky dogwood and elderberry here are the elderberries when you harvest elderberry you should not harvest any red or green berries see these aren't ready yet so you'll have to come back for these but on in the same bush we have some ripe ones so when you harvest elderberry you're going to have to come back several times to the same area to get all of the right berries if you want to harvest thoroughly but you can also be a sustainable forager and just harvest the ripe ones where you are and then go elsewhere and harvest only the ripe ones bushes that i've harvested in the past each year end up producing more berries and the berries are a fruit so it is sustainable to harvest just the fruit let's talk about other ways to identify elderberry here is the elderberry bark elderberry bark has many bumps on it called lenticels when you feel up and down the stem on the bark it feels like braille which little bump is raised now let's take a look at the silky dogwood bark the silky dogwood bark doesn't have raised bumps it has more like linear bumps and lines and they don't feel like braille and they tend to have a green or a red background this one actually has a green background so let's talk a little bit more about elderberry itself elderberry is actually a poisonous bush the leaves are poisonous the bark is poisonous and the unripe berries are poisonous here in new england you can eat the ripe berries that need to be ripe you can eat the ripe berries but a small amount because there's components in elderberry the leaves the bark the unripe berries especially and still a little bit in the ripe berries that your body will turn into cyanide european elderberry sambucus negra can't even be eaten at all only the flowers so the sambucus negra berries even when they are ripe like this should not be eaten raw because they have higher levels of that cyanide-like component so what do we do with these well the flowers can be eaten raw and they're really the only thing that doesn't contain any toxins and the flowers can be made into tea delicious liqueur essential oil and then now that we have the berries of course you can make elderberry syrup you can make elderberry juice elderberry tea elderberry tincture so these berries need to be processed in some way and ex and introducing heat to them will cook away that toxin and then what you have you have an incredibly high in antioxidant food with a wonderful antiviral and antibacterial qualities so here we're looking at this panicle we have to wait we can't take this one because there's still some green and red berries on it so even though there's some that are ripe you could be really patient and just take the only the ripe ones from this or you can come back when it's ripe like this and what i do to collect these is i will just snap off the flower head here and take that home and freeze all of it in the freezer and then it's easier to get each one of these off once they're frozen and then i'll process them into some syrup

Channel: Cooking with Mrs G Rachel Goclawski

Views: 5,115

Keywords: elderberry, elderflower, cordial, St. Germaine, Liqueur, syrup, identification, ID, uses, how to

Id: fbH7IqEzKwM

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022