I made a compote for the winter using the very first Siberian honeysuckle berry. It looks beautiful, a rich burgundy color, and I think it will taste amazing, too.
I stock up on berry and fruit compotes for the winter every summer. I make two or three jars of every berry we grow at our dacha—currants (black, white, and red), raspberries and strawberries, serviceberries, cherries, and plums. And this is the first time I've made honeysuckle compote.
I got the recipe from the internet, where there are many different ways to make compotes. I was primarily interested in the proportions of water and sugar: 200 grams of sugar per liter of water.
I've been making compotes for many years, ever since I got married, and at first I did it the way my mother and grandmothers did. I even wrote down all the tricks for making different compotes in an old notebook. For example, for compotes made from sour berries and pitted ones, you need to use 2 cups of sugar per 1 liter of water. And if you're making compotes from whole fruits—apples, pears, plums, peaches, or apricots—then blanch the fruit in boiling water for 2-3 minutes before placing it in jars.
Now I make compotes my own way and don’t sterilize the jars over steam in a kettle.
For the honeysuckle compote, I took the following ingredients: berries, water, sugar.
Honeysuckle didn't weigh how much she collected from that amount and prepared it.
I sorted through the berries, removed the bruised ones, took off the leaves, and washed them well.
I washed and sterilized 4 liter bottles in the oven at 150 degrees for 15 minutes.
When the berries dried and the bottles became warm, I filled a third of the bottle with berries.
There was enough honeysuckle for three bottles, and I made enough syrup for four liters. I had to pick honeysuckle again that evening at the dacha.
I prepared the syrup like this: 200 grams per 1 liter of water (I poured 4 faceted glasses of sugar into a wide saucepan, filled it with 4 liters of water, brought the syrup to a boil and boiled it for five minutes).
I don’t weigh the sugar for compotes, but measure it out with an old faceted glass with a rim - 1 glass with a volume of 250 ml, filled to the brim, but without a slide, holds 200 grams of granulated sugar.
It's firmly imprinted in my memory that you need 2 cups of sugar for sour berry compote, and honeysuckle is a slightly sour berry, so I added another 400 grams of sugar to the syrup. So, my syrup is made with 4 liters of water and 6 cups of sugar (1:1.50). Even if it's too sweet, you can dilute it with water.
I carefully poured boiling syrup into the bottles with berries, closed them with sterile lids, twisted the bottles to make sure the lids weren’t leaking, wrapped the compote in a warm jacket and set it aside to cool.
This is the honeysuckle compote I made.
And now it's time for strawberry preparations, they're already ripening!
