In Good Taste #9: Elderflower "Champagne"
A super-summery drink you can ferment yourself; final call for June 3rd supper club; some thoughts on board games
Well, hello there! How are you?
Good I hope. Thank you so much for being here.
I’m well. Enjoying a busy week but looking forward to the long weekend. Also, I went to a great talk last night at the British Library as part of this year’s Food Season. It was called Fermentation: How Cultures Shape Culture and was a super-interesting discussion about the long history of fermented foods and how deep-rooted they are in almost every society. I’ve just joined the Fermenters Guild do it was wonderful to meet so many of “my people” and talk microbes! There are all sorts of other great events coming up so I highly recommend taking a look if you’re in London.
After we made some fermented cucumber pickles last week, I had intended to continue with our journey into brine pickles today. But the elderflowers are beginning to come out so I’m bringing you an unscheduled diversion into (mildly) alcoholic fermentation instead and sharing my elderflower “Champagne” recipe.
Like lacto-fermentation, ethanol (aka booze) fermentation is anaerobic, meaning it happens without oxygen. But instead of bacteria turning sugar into lactic acid and carbon dioxide, we have yeasts turning sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. It’s how we get wine beer and cider (anything stronger has to be distilled or fortified).
My grandmother used to make elderflower champagne every year. It was delicious - sweet and floral - and what my brother and I were given to drink for special occasions when the grownups had wine. She would put it in old Schweppes Bitter Lemon bottles and sometimes you’d hear a thump as they fell over in the cellar, the dimples in the bottom pushed out by the gathering fizz.
I haven’t measured the alcohol content but I would imagine it’s about 1-2%. Enough to get a small child mildly tooty if you give into their clamouring for a third glass. But nothing to be worried about. A nice light option for grown ups too or even a mixer for summer cocktails.
It’s so easy to make and so lovely. I really hope you give it a go. But if it doesn’t appeal I can also recommend this recipe for elderflower vinegar from the Natoora website (it’s for crazy huge quantities but just scale down). Try it on a salad of strawberry, cucumber and goats cheese topped with some of the pickled flowers.
Here’s the batch I made a couple of years back and the salad too.
Recipe: Elderflower Champagne
You’ll need a large bowl or very clean bucket for the initial steeping plus a couple of large bottles with airtight lids for the fermentation itself.
Ingredients
450g sugar
2 lemons
3l water
2tbsp cider vinegar
12 elderflower heads
Method
Put the sugar in a large bowl. Add the zest (you can do it in strips with a vegetable peeler) and juice of both lemons and then boil the water and pour it over. Stir to dissolve the sugar and leave to cool.
When it's more or less room temp, add the cider vinegar and the elderflower heads and make sure all the flowers are submerged. It's important you don't add the flowers to the water whilst it's hot as this will kill the natural yeasts that the "Champagne" needs to ferment.
Cover the bowl and set aside for 24 hours.
Have a taste. It should taste elderflowery. If it doesn't, give it another 24 hours.
Strain through a sieve lined with a muslin (or a clean J Cloth) and pour into bottles or jars with well fitting, airtight lids - you need something to catch the CO2 as things ferment or the “Champagne” won’t be fizzy. Clip top Kilner things will work but I prefer to reuse large plastic screwtop bottles (eg. big 2l Coke ones). Leave somewhere out of direct sunlight for about a week and see what happens. It's ready when it's fizzy and tastes good to you. This could be anywhere between a week and a month depending on the level of yeast on the flowers, what temperature you leave them at and all sorts of other variables. Every now and again open the bottles just a crack to let excess gas out so they don't explode. This is unlikely but possible so remain vigilant...
When things are as you want them, strain again to remove the sediment and keep in a cool dark place.
Notes
Pick your elderflowers on a sunny morning if you can as that’s when they’re at their most fragrant. And not just after a rainy spell as the water will wash away the pollen and its natural yeasts so you won’t get any fermentation happening. Give them a shake to remove and insects but don’t wash them or, again, you’ll lose the yeasts. Trim off any long stalks - you just want enough to keep the flower heads together.
There are a lot of other white flowers out at this time of year so I made this video the other day about how to identify elderflowers. I hope it’s useful.
If after a couple of days in bottles you’re not seeing any bubbles at all, add a pinch of instant yeast - just a tiny pinch! - which will get things going.
I know you’re probably sick of me selling my supper club but this is the last time I’ll be hawking this first one. This elderflower “Champagne” will feature in the welcome cocktail and make a beautifully summery start to the evening.
The full menu is as follows:
SYCAMORE SMYTH @ LIZZY’S ON THE GREEN JUNE MENU
Elderflower “Champagne” cocktail
Freshly baked focaccia bread, confit garlic oil
Burrata, fermented cherry tomatoes
Tortelloni filled with ricotta & preserved lemon, pea shoots, pistachio pangrattato
Chicken polpette/Aubergine polpette (V)
Asparagus, griddled courgette, farro & summer herb salad
Roast beet & lentil salad, raspberry vinaigrette, fermented beet crisps, white bean pureé, watercress pesto
Summer berry ice cream profiteroles, dark chocolate sauce, cultured cream, fresh and fermented berries
I'll be serving this menu twice, 6-9pm on June 3rd and 17th before moving on to something new for the July and August dates. Tickets are £45 per person and include a welcome cocktail. I’d really love to see you there.
I’ll be taking a break from In Good Taste next week whilst I get stuck into the prep but will be back the week after with another recipe. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss out and if you made the cucumber pickles from last week, don’t throw the brine away!
Cultural Fun
My husband and I got quite heavily into board games during the first lockdown. And I don’t just mean Monopoly or Scrabble. I mean what are generally referred to as “Eurogames”. Quite thinky, strategic things where it’s not always clear who’s winning until the end. We’d previously played quite a bit of Pandemic, a collaborative game where you work as a team to stop the spread of various diseases (represented by small coloured cubes) across the globe. But it seemed in poor taste to continue playing it once we were in the middle of an actual pandemic so we sought out alternatives. It turned out that there were many, many, many ways you could move small coloured cubes around a board. Hello Eurogames.
Generally we like the abstract strategy sorts of things (some of our favourites are Terraforming Mars, Caverna, Azul etc) but, feeling that we were well provided with these things James recently bought something called Sleeping Gods. It’s basically a board game version of those “choose your own adventure” books that were popular in the 80s. It’s kind of fun but, like those old books and their dice rolling to defeat orcs, requires that you pass some kind of semi-random test (drawing cards to see how far you can travel for example) before another bit of story is unlocked. I find this frustrating. It’s not immersive in the way a novel or a film is. It’s just admin before you get the next instalment. Pandemic on the other hand is strategically interesting and, crucially, creates its own narrative: you finish a game and a story has emerged from the game itself. You thought you had Europe under control, say, but a breakout in Rome defeated you just before you could get the cure. Or Asia looked lost but quarantining Bangkok stopped the spread for long enough to grasp at victory. The game mechanic creates a story rather than getting in its way.
Do you play board games? If so, which ones? I’d love to know.
I’ve been listening to the audio book of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith, a former news editor at Buzzfeed. Like most of the non-fiction stuff about online culture I’ve been consuming lately, it’s a bit depressing. He tells the story of how the relentless pursuit of “traffic” - eyeballs, clicks, engagement - has gone hand in hand with the rise of populism. There was one bit that made me smile though, a recollection of the “last good day on the internet”, 26th February, 2015, when people were obsessed with some escaped llamas and divided (but in a fun way) over the colour of a dress. Remember that? When the argument was blue and black vs white and gold not a howling vortex of culture war nonsense? Perhaps this is why I spend so much time “offline” these days, playing board games…
Bye! See you soon!
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In Good Taste is a Sycamore Smyth newsletter by me, Clare Heal.
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My grandma used to give this to us too - it's so delicious, and thanks for the reminder and recipe. There is normally a good supply of elderflower in the church yard across the road - so must remember to make it again this year (particularly as my other half is off the alcohol!). I'm sure that there are many tales of exploding bottles out there - we certainly left a large dent in the ceiling of our London flat when we moved to Newcastle. The plastic bottle is a wise solution.