Hi Peggy, 

That’s wonderful that your elderberry bush is thriving! You’re right; raw elderberries can be toxic due to the presence of cyanogenic glycosides, which can cause nausea and other more serious symptoms. In rare cases, people have been hospitalized from consuming raw elderberry juices. 

The good news is that simple processing with heat (in other words, cooking) greatly reduces the amount of cyanogenic glycosides and makes the berries or juice safe to eat. If you like, you can use a steam juicer to heat the berries and extract the juice, which can easily be frozen for long term storage. Elderberries are quite tart, so simmering the juice with sugar will create a more palatable product.

The instructions in our short article on berry syrups give a useful guide, but please note that elderberry syrup should not be canned. Recent research demonstrated that the pH of some elderberry varieties is too high for safe canning. We are waiting for further research to give us safe instructions for canning elderberry products. In the meantime, freezing is the best option for long term storage. Syrups can also be refrigerated and consumed within a few weeks before they spoil.

Drying or freezing whole berries are also options for preservation, but the advice to cook the product before consuming still applies. You could dry the whole berries and rehydrate later by simmering in a sauce pan, or you could use cooked berry pulp to make a fruit leather that could be stored in the sealed containers in the pantry. 

Hope this helps you enjoy your elderberry harvest, and thanks for using Ask Extension!

Jared

Wonderful! That sounds like a great way to preserve them.