Category Archives: Recipes

Elderflower Cordial Part 1

Here we are in mid June. What is in flower down in Zeb’s favourite woods?

The wild garlic has vanished and there are swathes of frothy cow parsley, icecream pink dog roses, sparkly blackberry blooms and the elders are full of ripening heads of fragrant baby stars.

This is the year I finally try to make elderflower cordial. My aunt Barbara, who lives on an island on Lake Mälaren, Sweden, makes this every year by the gallon and supplies all her neighbours and people who visit the one shop on Adelsö get the opportunity to sample it too!

The elderflowers have heads of little tiny star like florets, they look a bit like stelline, and on a warm summer’s day you can follow that glorious fragrance to the source….

It makes sense to only take a few from each shrub or tree as the elderberries that form later are a valuable source of food for birds in the autumn. We asked our local parkkeeper who maintains these woods which belong to the Council if it was all right and he was happy for us to collect some flowers for our personal use. We picked about half a bag, approx 25 flower heads, in the end.

Avoid picking them where spraying has taken place or near a roadside if you can and make sure you can identify them confidently. These woods are nowhere near farmland and I am pretty confident they haven’t been sprayed. The books say pick on a warm dry day, and choose flowers which have a mixture of not quite open budlets and open flowers.

I have no idea how the commercial stuff is produced, or where the manufacturers source the huge quantities of elderflowers they must need…. Maybe there are armies of elderflower pickers all over the world stripping the woods bare..

More to come….

Click here for Elderflower Cordial Part 2

Bread – Jeffrey Hamelman – Errata sheet

Just a quick info post for anyone who owns a copy and/or bakes from the wonderful ‘Bread’ by Jeffrey Hamelman.

Paul who organizes the Mellow Bakers (and has this great blog Yumarama Bread ) has been in contact with JH and has been given this errata information to distribute.

So if you want to update your book then pop over to Mellow Bakers and download the update, courtesy of Mr Hamelman! And if you are thinking about buying this book, make sure you ask which print run it is and get the latest one :)

Here is a pdf with a list of the breads in ‘Bread” available from Amazon. This book is not easy to find on the shelves of english bookstores so I hope it’s ok to put this here and doesn’t break any copyright rules. There are also chapters on decorative bread making and all you could want to know about braiding breads. Great reference book. Nuff said.

List of breads in “Bread” by Jeffrey Hamelman

Quick cucumber pickle

Thought I’d better join in the pickle posts! Celia has been pickling lemons and limes here which look fantastic!

Here is the Waitrose magazine version of a simple danish cucumber pickle. Fast and easy to make, keeps for about five days in the fridge.

When I was little we used to visit my great Aunt Gerda in Denmark and she always had a white cucumber pickle that tasted just like this. I have never seen it in a delicatessen in England, but this taste brings back memories of mosquitos and long grass and a little wooden summer house in the wood. The cucumber becomes magically crunchy when you treat it this way. Good with any fish, particularly smoked fish like trout or eel.

Take a fresh cucumber, give it a good wash. Take a fork and run the tines down the outside of the cucumber. Slice the cucumber thinly. Layer with a tablespoon of Maldon salt. Leave for ten minutes in a colander. Then rinse it well under a cold tap. Mix up golden castor sugar and white wine vinegar and add chopped dill. Proportions depend on how sweet/sour you like your pickle. Start with 70 ml vinegar to 40g g sugar and see how that works for you. Layer the cucumber in a sterilised jar, add the vinegar and sugar mix and chopped dill, give it a good shake and leave for a few hours before you try it.

Sweet sour salty dill – lovely!