When I harvested all the elderberries, I thought about juicing all of them and canning the juice but that’s a lot of heat and less heat usually means more nutrients are retained. It takes 55 – 60 hours per load to freeze dry 4 trays of them and by the time the oil is changed and the freeze dryer is defrosted, that’s another 8 – 10 hours unless I use the automatic defrost which takes more electricity. Rarely do I use the auto defrost feature.
So, I had to end up freezing a lot of the elderberries. It’s easier to clean them if they’re frozen. I cut them in clusters, rinse them, let them dry in the colander for a while, then put them in bins and freeze them. When it’s time to freeze dry them, I put the berries, stems and all, into a plastic container with a lid, shake and shake and shake. Most of the berries come off the stems and end up in the bottom of the container. The stems and debris mostly ends up on top and I can pick that out. There’s still plenty of tiny pieces of debris but I’ll either use the steam juicer or strain that out of the juice when I’m ready to make syrup or jelly with the berries.
With the extra turkeys we bought, I had to move the berries around and make room in the freezers so I started freeze drying them . . which should have already happened.
Each load (4 trays) in the freeze dryer gives me two half gallon jars and about 1 pint of berries. I have four more loads to run through the freeze dryer so, when those are done, along with what I had already freeze dried, I should end up with a total of 14 half gallons of freeze dried elderberries.
That’s a lot from two shrubs that were planted two years ago!
KATIE M PETERSON says
Does the color matter? Are the darker ones “ripe” ? Do you mix them together, when you juice them?
judy.blog@gmail.com says
Yes, color matters. Purple/black ones are totally ripe. At the end, when the bushes were starting to die from the heat, I had to cut everything off so some weren’t as ripe as I would have preferred but the less ripe ones, a few of those are ok. When making jelly, the green and not so ripe ones have more pectin which helps the jelly so I’ll use the jars that have mostly very dark berries in the syrup I’ll make and then the mixed – some ripe and some not so ripe . . they will go in jelly.
I got enough berries to make syrup and jelly for a couple of years. Hopefully in future years, we won’t have the extreme heat we had this summer that was so hard on fruit.
vivoaks says
Wow! That’s amazing that you get that many from two bushes!! You must really take good care of your plants!! I couldn’t begin to imagine that amount of elderberries. Enjoy!
judy.blog@gmail.com says
I spend a lot of time with my plants but they seemed to be very happy here til near the end when it was so hot and they were looking sad so I cut all the berries off to give them a bit of relief. They just like it here. They were cuttings off the plants I had in Texas and with probably 30 plants there, I never harvested more than a couple of gallons of dried berries. So, I’d like to take credit but I don’t think i had a lot to do with the production.