Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome back to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies and this is the regular monthly slot where I run through some money saving ideas to make the fresh seasonal fruit and veg we've been buying last a bit longer, go further and store better. The idea is to help you get the best out of your fresh produce so that we spend less, waste less and actually get around to eating what we've bought.
As you might know from previous months, I build my content around seasonal produce. And my main product that I sell is a set of 12 children's books that are set in a veggie patch. Each book focuses on different fruit and veg that's in season that month. And because they were chosen to make sure that children explore lots of different plant families during the year, I use the same produce from the books here to talk through storage and money tips so that we cover them all during the course of the year too.
This month, the book of the month is Rhubarb Has A Cold. So it's a little unusual because it's a single food this time, which is rhubarb. Rhubarb could be quite expensive in the shops, especially out of season. So if you come across some on offer or if you grow it or have a friend or relative with an allotment or veggie patch who gives you a bunch,then it's great to store it properly and find good ways to use it.
So first of all, how do we store it?
Once it's been harvested, the best way to keep rhubarb is in the fridge, although it will manage OK on the worktop for a couple of days if you have a lot and you don't have room in your fridge. If it dries out, it tends to go stringy or really spongy and dry.So if you do need to keep it at room temperature while you're getting around to processing it, it's worth wrapping it in a damp tea towel. But if you can prep it a little bit and get it into the fridge, then that's the best bet.
Chop it into the longest pieces that will fit in your fridge. Don't forget that only the stalks of rhubarb are can make your stomach really poorly. So make sure you chop the leaves off and err on the side of chopping off a couple of extra centimetres of stem rather than risking getting a bit of leaf in the mix.
Don't worry if a lot of your stems are greenish. Rhubarb stems are often a mix of red and green. As the season goes on and there's more sunlight, the green can be more prevalent, so there's nothing wrong with that. We tend to get the purely pink stems from early forced rhubarb, which I talked about back in episode 63. Anyway, then once it's chopped into manageable stem pieces, or if you bought it from the shop, it will have arrived in celery stalk length pieces, get it into a bag to retain the moisture and either pop in a damp paper towel with it or wrap the rhubarb in a damp tea towel inside the bag. If it's going to be a few days until you eat it, don't wash it until you prep it. Washing before storing can sometimes make it more susceptible to rot, so just do the washing before you use it. Rhubarb stored like this in the fridge can last up to a couple of weeks. Just check it every couple of days to make sure. Try to keep it in relatively big pieces though, if you chop it into smaller pieces before storing, you're increasing the surface area. So you only really get about three, maybe four days storage time. So it's much better to store in longer lengths if you can find space in the fridge and then just chop it before you use it.
If you find that you've got a lot of rhubarb all in one go, or if you grow it and you're picking it every few days and you don't want to get sick of it while it's growing rampant, then you can obviously absolutely freeze rhubarb. I'm going to hand over now to our regular monthly chat with the lovely Kate Hall from The Full Freezer about the principles of freezing rhubarb.
Joanne (03:26)
Right, we're lucky enough to have Kate here again, our freezer geek, and she's come to talk to us about our food of the month. And this month's food of the month is So if people are growing rhubarb or they've bought some rhubarb at the supermarket, it can be quite expensive. So if you can get it in season, it is worth keeping Do you have to freeze that raw? Do you have to cook it? Do you put syrups in it? What do you do with fruits like these usually eat them with something sweet?
Kate (03:49)
There’s quite a lot of flexibility around this to be honest. It is recommended to blanch rhubarb for just a minute to retain the colour if you want to keep that vibrancy of it. And the blanching process is literally just popping the slices of rhubarb into a pan of boiling water. So it wants to be on a rolling boil already, let it come back up to the boil, which should only take about a minute, leave it in there for a minute and then scoop it out and get it into some ice water. And as I said, that would help to retain the colour. Now, if you were someone who's very busy and you're a bit tired and like, I do not have time to start getting pans out and start blanching things, then I would say you can get away with just chopping it up and just popping it in the freezer.
Joanne (04:36)
If you don't mind the loss of colour and you're in a hurry.
Kate (04:39)
Exactly, exactly. If you're going to do something like put it into a crumble, you might not be all that bothered, you know, about how the colour is looking and everything. You can also, if you were wanting to go through the process, if you know that you are only going to use the rhubarb as stewed rhubarb, then you could totally go through the process of just stewing all of it and then just separating it into usable portions. And as long as you cool that down relatively quickly, so you want it to cool down within sort of an hour to two hours, absolute max. And I would recommend getting some of the food nets, it's a really good idea, particularly if you you've got something sweet, you don't want to be attracting flies and everything, and you don't want to have gone to all that effort of preparing it only to see a blue bottle sitting on your rhubarb.
So I always recommend covering it up, cool it quickly, and then freeze it in usable portions. Personally, I tend to flat freeze things like rhubarb. So I use compostable freezer bags for something like this, which would allow me to defrost it very quickly. So I could either grab the bag and pop it in the fridge if I was planning ahead a little bit, or I could just grab it and pop it into a dish of cold water and then within 20 minutes, half an hour, it's going to be soft enough for them to be able to get out and use it for whatever I'm wanting to do with it. So that's my personal preference.
If you want to freeze it in tubs or anything, that's absolutely fine. Just make sure that you are freezing it in quantities that you can use because particularly if you are reheating it, if you're doing something like a crumble, you will have technically already cooked that rhubarb once when you stewed it, so you should only really reheat it again once. So if you're going to cook a crumble with it, you're going to want to eat that crumble in one go. So you're not going to want to then batch cook, you you shouldn't be batch cooking crumbles using rhubarb that you've already stewed and you've already reheated and then you're going to reheat it again. would be sort of the best advice on that. And then the other option, which I have to confess, I don't really tend to do but some people really like is that option of using things like sugar syrups. The ratios as I understand it's based on the sourness of the fruit, depends on whether you use a light syrup or a heavy syrup. But you can just pack it up in the syrup. And as I say, that could either be in a tub or it could be in freezer bags. And then again, as long as it's in usable portions, because you're not going to be able to refreeze it. So when you defrost it, you need to be able to use the whole lot all in one go.
And then there are some videos on my, Can I Freeze It? don't think I've done rhubarb just yet, but I know it is on my to-do list.
Joanne (07:28)
That's brilliant. Okay. Well, I'll put a link to everything in the show notes. And if you've done the can I freeze it by then for Rhubarb, I'll pop that on too.
Kate (07:35)
Fabulous, thank you, thanks so much Joe.
Joanne Roach (07:41)
Kate did make a Can I Freeze it? video for rhubarb just after we recorded our interview, so I'll link to that in the show notes, as well as to an article about freezing rhubarb in syrup. As Kate says, we have to be careful about reheating frozen foods over and over again, so it's always worth thinking through how you're going to use the end product before deciding how to freeze something.
So if you're probably going to be using your frozen rhubarb in a crumble, then it might make sense to stew it before you freeze it to speed you up when you're making the crumble. But then just think it through because as Kate says that crumble cooking is actually the first reheat of that stewed fruit. So any crumble you don't eat in one sitting shouldn't really be reheated again. So if you like batch cooking crumble or if you tend to make it in a big dish and usually have leftovers for one or two days, then it might be worth instead freezing the rhubarb raw and then defrosting it when you make the crumble so that that's the first cooking and then you can reheat the leftovers without worrying about it.
On the other hand, if you're wanting to use the rhubarb for things like adding to cereal, porridge or yoghurt in a compote or sauce, then it's absolutely worth stewing it and freezing it in individual portions because you're just going to heat those individual portions through and use them straight away. use case will help you decide how to prep it for freezing.
Okay, so that's freezing.
And for the listeners who are into dehydrating foods, you can definitely dehydrate rhubarb either in a dehydrator or a low oven with the door open and then store it that way. When it's rehydrated, it doesn't quite get back to the same texture. It's a little bit more chewy as with a lot of dehydrated foods, but there are still some quite interesting uses for it. Rehydrated pieces can be used in baking recipes like muffins or cookies Where the point is to still have a bit of chew in the fruit.
But the best use for me is to add it to herbal tea mixes to provide an astringent tang. It's really nice mixed with dried strawberry pieces, dried mint or dried apple And those mixtures can be drunk either as a hot tea or then cooled down with ice for a cold fruit tea. The other interesting thing you can do with dehydrated rhubarb, which I haven't tried yet, but I am going to, is to make it into a powder to add that tanginess to smoothies or other fruity recipes. Or indeed, you could use it in small amounts in something like a curry where you would normally use either lemon juice or mango powder. If you want to try this, just blend a little bit at a time. The pieces will store longer in chunks than in powders. So just blend up a batch to last a few weeks at a time. If you've tried rhubarb powder, I'd love to hear how you got on and anything you've used in.
Rhubarb also ferments well so if you're into fermenting then you can find the instructions online and it can make a really nice pickle or even be used to make a fermented drink.
Okay so now we've stored our rhubarb but if we're at the stage of cooking with it what can we make to use up some rhubarb? The obvious first answer is a crumble and there's a reason it's a classic the tartness and softness of the stewed rhubarb pairs beautifully with that crispy sweet crumble topping. Almost all rhubarb will need some sweetening in the base. If you have the earliest January forced pink rhubarb, you might get away with just a sweet topping, but usually adding a little sugar to the rhubarb or another sweet fruit is better. Pairing it with strawberries is great or a sweet eating apple is good too and it provides a break in the texture as well. I'll link to a couple of variations in the show notes and a vegan and dairy free option too.
Children can find the tartness of rhubarb a bit of a challenge and the texture of stewed fruit is difficult for lot of children too, especially rhubarb because it's got a stringy quality to it. So think through how you're going to introduce it to them for the best chance of success.
Sometimes using it blended in with other things can work, or you can make it into juice and use it in a lemonade recipe in place of the lemons. Or on the opposite texture end, using it in small chunks in a recipe where it’s only going to be cooked for a short time and it stays chewy, such as in a muffin or a cookie can work really well. I'll link to an example of each. The cookies recipe is for my own website and has full instructions for children to make them themselves. Rhubarb can be eaten raw, although it's so tart that no one usually does, but that means you don't have to worry about it only having a few minutes baking in a recipe. Crumble bars in a tray bake are also really easy to put together and combine the softness of a cake with a crumbly, streusely topping, so those work perfectly with rhubarb and they cut into nice bars that you can eat some and freeze some for later. I'll link to an example.
Rhubarb made into a simple jammy sauce like a compote is beautiful with yogurt, ice cream, cereal or oatmeal. I'll link to a basic recipe and this is the kind of thing that you can freeze in portions as I was talking about earlier. And if you want a longer term preserve and you like making jam, then it makes brilliant jam and it was a wartime staple because it grew so easily in gardens. My favourite combination is rhubarb and ginger and I'll link to an example of that.
If you want something less sweet to use it up in, then rhubarb works really well in a simple sauce or chutney as a sweet and sour accompaniment to rich foods such as strong flavoured or fatty meats like duck, or belly pork. One really nice savoury way to use it is with Asian sauce flavours like soy or five spice to add depth to it. I'll link in the show notes to a recipe which combines soy, five spice, ginger and chilli with rhubarb and some honey for a lovely noodle dressing. That particular recipe is with pork, but you could easily make it with marinated tofu too. But you can also just put some lightly cooked rhubarb on the side of anything like pork chops without having to make some kind of fancy sauce and it will still add a lovely tart accompaniment. Another pork recipe that uses rhubarb is a barbecue style stew. I'll link to a wonderful recipe that uses strong barbecue flavours and quite a lot of rhubarb with pork ribs. And I'll also link to a plant-based rhubarb barbecue sauce that can be used with the protein of your choice. Rhubarb can also work well with dark chicken meat like drumsticks or thighs so I'll link to a chicken casserole too which uses this combination in a one pot dish
If you're plant-based though, as well as switching out the meat in those recipes for alternatives, there are also some great veggie recipes and I'll link to a roundup list in the show notes.
Okay, so that's my roundup on storing and using up rhubarb. Was there anything in there that surprised you? It's a great UK-grown plant that requires very little input, so we could all do with eating a bit more of it. I'll pop the link to Kate's video on freezing rhubarb in the show notes along with quite a few suggestions for the recipes. I'll see you on Thursday for another episode and in the meantime, happy eating!
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