I was pondering today that elderberries are all intensely bitter, and need to be juiced and cooked with sugar in order to be palatable. The leaves, stems, and sometimes seeds are all poisonous, so the pulp needs to be discarded.
This is a big pain in the neck. It’s just barely worth it for the medicinal value, and for the fact that (with a lot of sugar) it’s a medicine that tastes good enough that my children will eat it.
But . . .
Has anybody bred an elderberry cultivar with less toxicity and bitterness? (I suspect those are the same thing.) Something that can be eaten fresh would be awesome. Even something with reduced bitterness would require less sugar to be palatable, so I wouldn’t have to feed my children as much sugar.
But . . .
Would that be desirable? Is the bitterness not only a poison, but also the source of the health benefits (when taken in far smaller quantities)?
I would love elderberries that can be eaten fresh like blackberries and have immune benefits. Would that be possible?
American elderberries are not toxic cooked raw or otherwise, so I think starting with selections like Ranch, Pocahontas, Adams, Nova and Scotia would be good. I don’t know if they have the same medicinal qualities though.
You can also make an oxymel or a honey ferment of them to avoid the sugar (sort of) and use honey instead.
I think if they tasted much better, the birds would eat them All instead of leaving us some.
If you’re interested, you could try steam juicing the berries. We have a wood stove going all winter, so it’s prime steam juicing time. You’d be able to harvest the berries, throw them into the juicer, then process it to get all the juice out. Toss the berry mash into the compost when you’re done. Saves you from having to stand there babysitting them in a pot on the stove cooking them down.
I imagine you’d have to send off different varieties of berries to get their nutrient amounts tested and know where you’re starting from, then start your breeding program from there.
I don’t know in the specific case of elderberry, but in general bitter is a vastly misunderstood taste. Many strongly medicinal foods and compounds are bitter - - dandelion and quinine to name two obvious ones. It’s a cornerstone taste of many traditional diets and systems of healing. While you can’t say of any person in any state of health “here, give them bitter, it will help”, nor can you say that bitter foods are never harmful, I do firmly believe that the regular consumption of healthy bitter foods would improve the health and longevity of most modern humans.
I bought an electric juicer specifically because it was so much more efficient and took so much less time than using a strainer and trying to squish the juice out. It makes life SO much easier!
How does a steam juicer work? Is it difficult to use? That might be a neat tool, especially since it doesn’t require electricity. What else do you use it for?
From what I’ve heard, bitterness is usually a sign of toxicity, which is why we have an instinctive aversion to it. However, “the dose makes the poison,” and most medicinal herbs are bitter, and considered inedible in large quantities. This implies they’re likely toxic if eaten in large quantities, even though they’re very healthy in small quantities.
This would make sense, since there’s a healthy dose limit for everything, including water!
I use a steam juicer. Some fruits have to be broken up a little, all have to be washed. Otherwise I just put the fruit in and the juice comes out hot.
There is a water reservoir underneath, steam rises through the fruit and breaks it open, breaks down and releases the juice. Juice comes out the bottom through a hose into prepared jars.
Since it comes out near boiling and most fruits are sufficiently acidic, I just fill the jars as close to the rim as I can and slap a lid on. They self-seal because of the heat.
Top section is where the fruit goes. Mid section is where the juice percolates down to. Bottom section is your water for steam makin’. The tube is where the juice empties out from - like Lauren said, it comes out nearly boiling, so like her we slap a canning lid on it, tip the jar upside down, and let it seal itself. It would seal itself without being upside down as Lauren said, we just hadn’t tried that yet.
Very easy to use though. Fill the top with fruit, fill the bottom with water, put it on a burner or a wood stove, and let it boil and steam the juices out of the fruit. We pull juice out of the tube when we’ll get a rather large amount to fill the jars so it’ll be hot enough to seal.
Year before last we used it to make pear and apple juice from the trees growing in the village we lived in. It was great for the pears because most of them had hard ‘stones’ growing in their flesh, which made it difficult and unpleasant to eat. Instead, we sliced them up and tossed them in the steam juicer.
This year we have leftover bags of frozen fruit still in our freezer and added a few bags of chopped up rhubarb as well. I imagine we’ll play with adding the two together to make some weird juice combos for ourselves and our adventurous friends.
We have a number of different elders. The one which came labelled as American elder is not fully deciduous here whereas the others are. Apart from this fairly minor difference, which could be just natural variation, I am unable to distinguish one from the other species-wise. In fact, some botanists class them as the same species. That seems reasonable as they appear to readily cross in both directions.
I don’t find my English elderberries are too bitter once they’re full ripe, though then it’s a race against the birds to pick them! As it as the birds who planted the tree, I guess we need to share. It’s not just my tree, when I pick from other elder trees in the area I can usually eat a few of the berries raw. And I am very bitter sensitive, so they must be low bitterness. I’m happy to save and send some seeds in the autumn, though I’m not sure they’ll arrive with you safely from the UK.
The elderberries in my Bulgarian garden however are far more bitter, they look the same but could be a slightly different species. The low growing elderberries there which are definitely a different species - they taste and smell plain awful, but are said to have different and quite powerful medicinal uses. Hoo boy, they do taste like medicine!
(At least) two species of elderberries grow in the mountains of northern Utah. The one with black berries tastes terrible to me, which I consider, without any justification, to be poisonous. I don’t understand how anyone would eat it.
Yeah, the one my neighbor has is black-fruited. It looks like Sambucus nigra; I just don’t know if there are other related species that look the same way.
I’ve never seen red-fruited varieties, the English ones are all S. nigra, I think. When I say mine aren’t bitter when ripe, I wouldn’t sit down and eat a whole bowl of them raw. But I have no problem eating a few as I pick a load to make syrup. I did honey fermented elderberries last year instead of syrup, and once it finished fermenting added brandy to preserve it. Probably didn’t need the brandy, but it made an amazing liqueur!
If you have room to take a chance on a grow-out of a few of my seeds, I’ll gladly send some come autumn.
I love making honey ferments! My hubs makes an elderberry oxymel (honey+vinegar) syrup as a medicinal. Adding brandy would take this to a whole other level. Something to try!
I’d also love to grow out some of your elderberry seeds if you’re willing to send some.
I’d love to try some of your seeds come autumn! I can winter sow them in pots to get them stratified, and transplant the best sprouts into nice spaces in my front yard in spring. They sound like an excellent population to be growing. Thank you!
I agree all the wild English elderberries I’ve tried are very tasty, to me at least. I may try to gather enough to make wine from this year, or add some to grape must. From my understanding the toxicity in the stems and seeds will break down in cooking or fermentation. But I could never find information on cooking times or temperatures. At least for wine it means I don’t have to be so meticulous about the seeds.
Elder trees also provide 3 crops; the flowers, berries, and jelly ear fungus
