This time of year we have mulberries aplenty from our big tree out the front so they can be used in pies, or on ice cream or preserved as jam, but I wondered how they would go as a cordial. This recipe is based on Sally Wise’s in her book “a Year on the Farm”, which has lots of great recipes in it. Anyway, I decided to give it a go and this is what I did –
1 kg Mulberries
1 litre of water
Sugar
2 level teaspoons of Tartaric Acid
I picked the mulberries over a couple of days into an empty ice cream container and kept it in the fridge in the meantime.
Once I had my kilogram I put it into a 2 litre or so size pot and then put the litre of water in and brought it to the boil. I simmered it gently for 15 minutes. I then lined a strainer with a clean tea towel and placed the strainer over another pot and poured in the water and mulberry mix, squeezing the tea towel up a bit to get some more of the liquid out.
Once cooled the cooked mulberries went to the worms in the worm bath.
I then measured the mulberry liquid into the original pot (I got 5 cups) and then added as many cups of sugar as there were cups of mulberry juice. I then brought the whole shebang up to near the boiling point again and stirred in the tartaric acid. I then lightly simmered the mix for two minutes to make sure the sugar and tartaric acid were dissolved.
All that remained left to do was pour into sterilised bottles and seal. I use Bickfords lemon juice cordial when I am too busy (read: lazy) to make my own and it comes in glass bottles so we keep them to refill. Each bottle is 750mls and we got two full ones and one about a third full.
The brew wound up being fairly thick and is quite rich. I can’t drink lots of it like I can the citrus based cordials. I usually make lemon cordial but the recipe works equally well with limes, but not so nice with oranges for some reason, but I drink lots over the summer. The mulberry cordial is more of like the port you have after a meal than an all day, every day drink, for me it is anyway. It tastes REALLY good over ice cream too!
