Episode 38 Preserving Rhubarb

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my pantry, where I try to preserve everything possible. Well just about everything. And last episode I shared with you how I make rhubarb jam, and today I'm going to be talking about how to preserve rhubarb. Because as much as I love growing things, I also love figuring out a way how I can save it to use it when it's not growing or producing.

So for us, the rhubarb comes on in May. I use it in several different recipes, and then I start freezing it, and then I can use that rhubarb in the middle of wintertime when it's cold and freezing, and I can make delicious rhubarb cobbler, rhubarb bread, rhubarb muffins. Gosh, the list just goes on and on with rhubarb recipes.

So let me share with you my method for freezing. First I go and harvest the rhubarb. Now, when you're harvesting rhubarb, try not to take more than a third of the plant that's there of the stalk that are there. You always want to leave enough on there so that that rhubarb plant can continue to grow, that the leaves will be putting energy back into the plant and it will continue to thrive.

So great thing about freezing and rhubarb, if you could only pick 2, 3, 4, 5 stocks and that's all you have no worries. Freeze that and a couple weeks later, go pick a little bit more and you can just continually add to the bag of frozen rhubarb. So I go out and I pick my rhubarb.

Remember that the leaves are toxic. The stalks are edible, but the leaves are toxic. Discard those leaves. Don't even bring them in the house.

Bring your rhubarb in. I wash it up, and then I chop it into pieces that I'm going to need. Now I always think about how I'm going to use the rhubarb and I chop it into those sized pieces. So if I'm making a cobbler, I usually chop it into a half inch to an inch sized pieces.

If I'm making muffins, I like very small pieces, almost a very small dice. So I'll cut those into very small pieces. It's much easier to cut those into the sizes that you need now while the rhubarb is fresh than after it's frozen. And then you simply just put the rhubarb into Ziploc bags. You could also use other freezer type containers, like vacuum seal bags work perfectly for this as well.

I tend to use the Ziploc bags because one of the things that I do is I put the rhubarb in there, and like I said before, I'm often adding more rhubarb to that bag. When you're doing it within a span of a few weeks or even a month, that is totally fine to keep adding to the bag. Now many people take the rhubarb and first lay it out on cookie sheets until it's fully frozen, and then add it to the Ziploc bag.

I don't find that that's a necessary step. The rhubarb itself is not super wet. You, you are going to rinse that rhubarb off, of course, after you harvest it, but you want all that water to get off of there before you start chopping it up. So just, you know, let it drip off. The rhubarb is not wet, because it's not a super high hydration type of a fruit. It doesn't have a lot of moisture in it.

It doesn't stick to each other, so it's easy to use. So I literally chop it up, scoop it up, put it in the Ziploc, roll it down, get as much air out of it as I can, put the date and the contents in it, and put it in the deep freeze. And then a couple weeks later, I can just add a little bit more to.

Another way that I do it is I will chop up that rhubarb. Let's say that I'm doing it for the muffins, and I shared with you that I like very small diced rhubarb for that. So I'll cut that up. I tend to use the amount of rhubarb that I'm going to need for that recipe. I'll put it in a smaller Ziploc bag, and then I'll put usually four of those into a gallon size Ziploc bags.

So I'll have four individual bags in there, and then. For four different batches of muffins, and then when I'm ready to bake, I just pull out one of the smaller bags of rhubarb and then make my muffins.

When I am using frozen rhubarb, I don't thaw it first. I add it directly to whatever I'm making, and then I just increase the baking time a little bit and it depends what you're making anywhere between five and 10 minutes.

So freezing rhubarb is a really great idea. It's just so fun to pull that out and have something delicious from your garden in the middle of. I'll see you next week in the pantry. Bye.

Thanks for listening, and be sure to tune in again next week for more episodes of Preserving the Pantry.