Hi, I'm Tieraona Low Dog, and I am here at my friends' at Mountain Rose Herbs, and
I'd like to show you how to make a basic elderberry syrup. You know, the winter
months are coming along and one of the questions I get asked a lot, "Are
there things that I can use for my family that are sort of nutritious, and
help get us through the sniffle season, you know, strong and healthy?".
Well, one of my favorite herbs is elderberries. Now you can use them fresh
or dried, but for our purposes, I'm going to show you how to make dried
elderberries, because they're easier to find, right, all year long. It's easy to
access dried elderberries. Now, when you're using elderberries and you're
making a syrup, there's just a couple things I want you to keep in mind. Syrups
that are shelf-stable, meaning that they're going to sit out at
room temperature for a long period of time, require more sugar, you're going to
have to...or alcohol...but you're going to have to add something to it to keep from
getting bacteria and mold and other things. So the syrup I'm going to teach
you how to make today, I'm intending for you to keep it in the refrigerator,
all right? And you don't need to use as much sugar, and we're not going to use
alcohol, so it'll be stable for everybody in the family, except we are using honey
as our preservative. And remember, honey itself has lots of wonderful properties
to it, especially during the the sniffle season. But, honey is not safe for
children under the age of 1 year old, right? So you can't use honey. If you are
going to make this recipe for somebody that was littler than 1, that we were
going to share with in your household, you would need to substitute either
sugar or maple syrup for that, and again, you would keep it in the refrigerator.
But again, honey is my preferred preservative as well as sweetener in
syrups, but just not suitable for kids under 1 because of a rare condition
called infantile botulism. Sounds scary, you don't want it, all right? Now, so when
you're going to make your syrup, all you need to do is have a pan this is a
ceramic, nonstick pan; glass works well too. I mean, I think the main thing you
want to avoid are any types of pans that off-gas or do anything else like
that with making your herbs. I discourage you from having them in your house
to cook anything anyway. So, this is a nice pan we're going to use, we have
dried elderberries, we have some ginger, I like ginger in my elderberry
because it's very warming, it has a very warming effect, and when people feel like
they're just getting a little bit under the weather, that ginger really kind of
has this dispersing quality to it. It's very, very nice in a syrup. So all we're
going to do is, we're going to take our pan, and this is 2 cups of pre-measured
dried elderberries. All right, so I'm going to put it into my pan, okay, and
here I have 4 cups of water that's already been pre-measured...Remember that
your finished herbal product is only as good as what
you start with, right, so the ingredients matter, and that
includes water. So water should be distilled, or it should be a good spring
water, or purified water, depending upon where you live. Now, I'm going to add the
4 cups of water here. I like a lot of things in my elderberry syrup. Today, I'm
going to just use ginger and cinnamon, but I also want to tell you that you
should be creative. There's not just one way to make spaghetti sauce, every
grandma has their spaghetti sauce recipe, right? And it had little tweaks of
this or that in it, and so you want to be creative with your syrups. I think one of
the things that beginners often struggle with when they're just learning how to
make some of these herbal products for their home, is that they're
very rigid in how they do things. You can be creative, you can add vanilla bean
(I LOVE, like, a slice of vanilla bean in here),
cardamom tastes really good... So just be...give yourself permission to play with
the flavor, okay? Now this is ginger, this is dried ginger, and again, I love ginger.
I mean, during the cold season, is there anything better than just coming home on
a cold day, everybody's chilled, and you make yourself a cup of ginger tea with a
squeeze of lemon and a little honey in it? I mean...So ginger is sort of
associated with cold weather because of its beautiful warming properties. Now you
don't want to use too much dry ginger because it's stronger
than the fresh, right? It's just, it's stronger in its flavor than the fresh.
So we're gonna just put this on—whup, let let me put my cinnamon stick in here, got put in my
cinnamon stick—and we're gonna turn on our heat (is this not the cutest,
EVER, sort of, little hot plate? I want one!) So anyway, we're going to turn this on,
and we're gonna watch it. We're gonna watch it, we're going to stir it up
occasionally. I'm going to let this come to a boil, and as soon as it begins to
boil, I'm going to turn down the heat, and I'm going to let it simmer for 30
minutes, all right? So it's just going to simmer for 30 minutes, I'm going to leave
it covered, I'm gonna keep an eye on it. And then, once it's done simmering, I'm
going to turn the heat off, and I'm gonna let it steep for an hour, all right? So
you know the longer, the longer you simmer and steep something, the more
we're going to be able to pull into the water, because we're gonna discard all
the herbs, so we want to get as much as we can basically into our liquid tea
before we turn it into our syrup. So we've simmered our elderberry for 30
minutes, and now we're letting it steep for an hour we're almost to the end of
that. And I just wanted to go over a couple of things with you.
You know, how much herb you use to how much water when you're making a syrup
varies on a number of things: the type of herb that you're using, and what
your overall goal is. So in this case, I used 1 ounce of elderberry for every
4 ounces of water. Now, this is a very strong decoction that I'm making, right?
Because I'm going to make it into a syrup where I only want to have to
take, you know, a teaspoon, a couple teaspoons a day. So remember this is a
strong tea. Teas are normally consumed, you know, you drink cups of it every day,
so when you're making a syrup, it's got to be stronger, right? You have to use
more herb for water. One ounce of herb to 4 ounces of water, 1 ounce of herb
to 8 ounces of water, tends to be common. If you find a recipe for
elderberry syrup that says 1 ounce of the elderberry to like 16 ounces of
water, that's also a perfectly fine recipe. What you'll have to remember is,
after you've simmered and steeped, you'll strain the herb, and then you've got to
reduce it by half. So you'll have to, you'll have to
simmer it for another, you know, 20 to 30 minutes until it's reduced to half of
its original volume. That is a perfectly acceptable way of making syrups. The
reason I'm teaching you this way, is because many herbs, you don't want to do
that with, like thyme herb. If you were making a thyme syrup, if you put 1 ounce
to 16 ounces of water and then you had to reduce by half, all that heat would
destroy a lot of the therapeutic properties, all of the wonderful volatile
oils and that that are in thyme. Osha is the same kind of thing, so this is a
good standard recipe for you to remember: 1 ounce of herb to 4 ounces, steep
or simmer based upon the herb, strain, and then add 50%—measure your final liquid,
and then add 50% honey, and you're done, okay? So we'll write this all down in the
blog so you'll have it all written so you know, you know all the little
variations you can do. But right now, we're done, the timer's gone off, and I'm
going to strain out our elderberry, our ginger, and our cinnamon. Now, to do this,
you just need an appropriate-sized jar, any kind of funnel (canning funnels or
other types of funnels are good). If you're going to use a cheesecloth, make
sure that you really do double it up so that you don't get little pieces coming
through; you can also use an undyed muslin. I encourage you to, you know, you
can certainly purchase them online, on many places and including getting a lot
of these supplies from Mountain Rose Herbs, but I would also say going to your
local fabric stores can also be very good, because they have huge, huge rolls
of undyed muslin which can also be very useful for these kinds of things that
you do at home. So now, we're just going to pour our syrup through our
cheesecloth—oh it smells divine! I know you can't smell it through the camera,
but let me tell you, the cinnamon and the ginger are really coming through with
this sort of subtle, beautiful elderberry, just gorgeous!
Now this is quite hot, so if you are going to squeeze this, really, well, you'd
want to make sure that you have gloves on or that, or that you've left the lid
off that last 15 minutes or so, so it cools off, because you don't want to burn
your hands, right? And then you'll just, you'll just squeeze really well—oh,
that's so beautiful!—and when you're finished with your herbs, you know, I hope
you compost them (they're great to just put out in your compost pile), that you
just don't throw them, you know, down the sink or in the trash. Your plants
like to go back into the earth where they came from, alright? So then, we sort
of take this out...beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! And then, you would add your
honey. So you would measure how much liquid you have, right? So if you have 16
ounces of your finished syrup, you would add 8 ounces of your honey or your maple
syrup, right, or your sugar, right? But honey is the best, really. For sniffle
season kinds of syrups that you're making, use the honey. You may not know
this but actually, the American Academy of Family Practice and the American
Academy of Pediatrics, they sort of recommend honey for younger kids that,
you know, come down with sniffles, and scratchy throats and that, because honey
is so soothing to the throat. So remember, not for children under the age
of 1, but honey is wonderful in and of itself.
So, if you have 16 ounces of your syrup, you would pour 8 ounces of honey
into your syrup...oh it's so beautiful! Now, I get a lot of questions about, "Is it
raw? Local? Which kind should I use?". Obviously, raw, local honey
is the best, and for the purposes of this video, we're sort of moving through these
steps kind of quickly. I would add my honey
once my syrup had cooled, not quite to room temperature, but close,
because I like to use raw honey, and I don't like to get the heat over
100 degrees when I'm using my raw honey, because I'd love to keep all those
good, natural enzymes and everything in there, right?
So, oh my goodness this looks so beautiful!
And I want you to think how little time and actually investment this took us to
make with our dried elderberries, a little cinnamon stick, some dried ginger
powder, and some raw, local honey. I have made now this beautiful elder ginger
cinnamon syrup. I'll store it in the refrigerator, I'll put the date on it so
it has the date that it was prepared (probably with heart, like something made
with love) on the date, and I'll put the name elderberry syrup on it, and then
I'll keep it in the fridge. And in our house, the way I would use this is, I
would just have everybody in the morning or in the evening enjoy 1 to 2 teaspoons
of this just straight out of the fridge, just as a daily nourishing sort of
beverage to take us through the sniffle season and the long winter months.
I hope you've enjoyed learning to make this basic elderberry syrup. I hope that
you'll try it at home, that you're not intimidated by trying these things,
because really, if you can make if you can make a basic spaghetti sauce, you can
make any herbal kind of remedy that you want. From my house to yours, thank you.