Rhubarb
Our favorite tart vegetable!
This month is the time for rhubarb goodies! Rhubarbs are a perennial vegetable, however, they’re commonly used as a fruit. Rhubarb is used as a fruit because of its sour and bitter taste when raw and is cooked with sugar to bring out the rich tart flavor that people know and love. Rhubarb became popular in sweets during the 18th and 19th centuries due to sugar being cheaply available to people in England so sugar was used to balance the natural flavor of raw rhubarb.
When searching for the best rhubarb at the markets, you’ll want to keep an eye out for fairly thin stalks that are dark pink to red in color. Rhubarb that is thick in stalk and green tends to taste sour, whereas properly picked rhubarb is tart in flavor. Fresh rhubarb tends to perish easily, so store the vegetable in a plastic bag (to retain its moisture) and keep it in a refrigerator crisper drawer for a 3-5 day period. After 3-5 days, the vegetable begins to lose the crispiness and tart flavor.
Besides being baked or cooked in dishes, rhubarb can also be preserved into jam, jelly or even chutney. It’s commonly canned with strawberry due to the fruits natural sugars it brings to the vegetable which allows less sugar to be used to balance the vegetable’s natural tart flavor.
To find out where you can find rhubarb at the markets, check out our blog for a complete list of vendors that sell it!
Rhubarb Cobbler
Inspired by Del’s Cooking Twist
The following recipe replaces butter for yogurt, which changed how the dish turned out. Due to this change in ingredients, the dessert ended up becoming a cobbler because the crust became more of a batter. The batter like texture created a rhubarb cobbler instead of a crumble.
Ingredients
Base:
½ cup of sugar
2 cups of almond flour
1 tbsp of baking powder
⅔ cup of Greek yogurt
1 large egg
Rhubarb Filling:
4-5 long rhubarb stalks
⅓ cup of sugar
1 lemon, zest and juice
2 ½ tsp of cornstarch
Crumble Topping:
1 cup of old fashioned rolled oats
½ cup of sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar
½ cup of coconut butter, melted
Preparation
Crust:
Mix all dry ingredients together. Slowly incorporate Greek yogurt until no lumps remain. Add the egg and stir well until the dough comes together.
Transfer the dough to the greased pan, covering the entire bottom of the pan.
Compote:
Heat the rhubarb with sugar, lemon zest and juice on medium heat until bubbling. Lower the heat and add cornstarch. Stir well. Let simmer for five more minutes until the mixture thickens.
Allow to cool for five minutes. Pour compote over crust in the pan.
Crumble Topping:
Mix all the ingredients together and sprinkle over compote.
Bake for 20-25 minutes until the top is golden brown. Let cool completely. Enjoy!
