I may have already talked about this but I didn’t see it. I don’t want to can the elderberry juice because heat destroys some of the health benefits. My plan is to juice all the berries, freeze the juice, take it out as needed and make the elderberry syrup. For those who don’t know why I’m so crazy about elderberry juice, this article has some good info.
I didn’t want to freeze the juice in my canning jars so we were at Walmart a week or so ago and I was looking for plastic containers. The only thing they had that would work were some containers that were about 1 quart in size and they were $2.99 each. I looked across the aisle and saw that they had 28 oz. bottles of Powerade on sale for $1 each. I told Vince . . we can dump the Powerade and re-use those bottles for less than it costs to buy the other ones so that’s what we did.
Yesterday I poured up the three quarts of juice I had already extracted. A quart of juice barely fits in the bottle and I figured I should leave room for expansion as it freezes so I didn’t fill them all the way up. When making the syrup, I’ll measure how much is in each Powerade bottle and adjust my syrup recipe accordingly.
Today I’m going to get all the berries juiced – all the berries from the fridge and all the berries from the freezer. Even with the bottles of juice going back into the freezer, that will still give me more room in the freezer and definitely more room in the fridge.