Rhubarb offers a welcome flash of fruity pinkness at the bleak end of winter. It has an appealingly astringent, sharp taste and a rather unique texture when cooked, as it breaks down into silky strands. Although it is not aromatic, it marries well with stronger flavours such as orange, rosewater, strawberry and ginger.
Indoor- and outdoor-grown rhubarb are two different animals. Indoor rhubarb – known as forced rhubarb – is prized for its delicacy, the softness of its flesh and its pretty pink colour, but sometimes, especially when it is imported, the flavour can be muted. Outdoor rhubarb is more fibrous, and becomes more so as the growing season progresses. Outdoor rhubarb is at its best when it is deep red and will most likely have a more concentrated taste than the indoor kind. When outdoor rhubarb grows too fast or gets too mature, and has a mainly green stalk, sourness can dominate.
When buying rhubarb, always go for full-length stalks where only the leaves have been removed. Supermarkets usually cut the stalks to make them fit into plastic bags, which makes the cut edges brown, weakens the crispness of the stalk and encourages it to rot faster.
Call it prejudice if you like, but UK-grown forced rhubarb usually tastes better than the imported Dutch equivalent, which can often be puny and taste bland.
Things to do with rhubarb
• Gently soften chopped pink or red rhubarb and golden caster sugar over a low heat until the rhubarb collapses and becomes juicy. When cool, perfume with rosewater. Marvellous with a rosewater-scented pannacotta.
• Add freshly grated or chopped preserved stem ginger to the fruity base for a rhubarb crumble.
• Gently soften chopped pink or red rhubarb with golden caster sugar over a low heat. As it cools, stir in sliced strawberries. The slight heat brings out the scent and jammy fruitiness of the berries.
• Gently soften pink or red rhubarb with golden caster sugar and a little freshly squeezed orange juice over a low heat. When almost cool, stir in pith-free segments of orange; blood orange looks particularly pretty.
• Make individual rhubarb pies in a muffin tin in preference to one large pie that will lose its shape when you cut it.
Is rhubarb good for me?
Rhubarb contains some useful soluble fibre; robust outdoor rhubarb contains more than the indoor-grown sort. This fibre slows down the rate at which sugar is released into the bloodstream. Otherwise, it has only minor amounts of vitamins, notably vitamins C and K, and other beneficial micronutrients, so any potential health benefit from these is likely to be more than undone by the amount of sugar required to sweeten it. There are many reasons to buy rhubarb, but health isn’t one of them. That said, rhubarb is a plant well used in traditional Chinese medicine, and is thought to have some laxative properties.
How is rhubarb grown?
Outdoor rhubarb grows well in Britain and Ireland, both in domestic gardens and commercially. Commercial growers usually dig up and divide the plants in winter, keeping a plant growing for three years. Forced rhubarb is grown by lifting outdoor roots once they have had a touch of frost, and then transferring them to warm, dark, indoor sheds. The lack of food and light triggers growth and ‘forces’ or makes the plant produce thin, tender, pale pink stalks with small, tightly curled yellow leaves. In Yorkshire, forced rhubarb is grown in purpose-built wooden sheds and the stalks are harvested by candlelight so that the younger stalks that are still growing are not exposed to light. In Holland, forced rhubarb is grown in glasshouses with blacked-out windows, harvested in electric light, and a plant hormone is used to stimulate growth in the plants for early production. The outdoor rhubarb we buy usually comes from the UK or Ireland.
Is rhubarb a green choice?
Once outdoor rhubarb plants are established in the UK and Ireland, they tend to be quite hardy and reasonably resistant to disease, so they don’t get many, if any, pesticide treatments. Their expansive green leaves help shade out unwelcome weeds. They do need quite a lot of fertilizer, but most outdoor growers dig in old rhubarb plants, or use indoor spent plants that have been composted as a fertilizer. Forced rhubarb only has one season. Rhubarb is a crop that grows well organically in the UK and Ireland.
Heating the sheds for indoor rhubarb does require the use of fossil fuels and these are non-renewable resources that are depleting rapidly. However, the sheds are only heated from November until March, and the availability of home-grown rhubarb at this time of year does reduce our reliance on imported fruit transported from much further afield, frequently by air. Yorkshire growers are trying to find a more renewable type of energy.
Dutch forced rhubarb often comes on to the market a few weeks earlier than our home-grown crop, but it is worth waiting patiently for the latter. Dutch rhubarb rarely competes on taste with the Yorkshire sort and, because of its transportation, it leaves a heavier carbon ‘foodprint’.
Rhubarb doesn’t need to be refrigerated and requires only minimal packaging. In fact, full stalks of rhubarb almost defy packaging. A plastic band does the job.
Where and when should I buy rhubarb?
Forced Yorkshire rhubarb is available from the end of January until March. Outdoor-grown rhubarb crops in all areas from April until July.
As they sell the stalks whole, not cut, greengrocers, markets and farm shops are the best places to buy rhubarb.
THE JEWEL IN OUR FOOD HERITAGE CROWN
Rhubarb is a well-loved and familiar fruit. In Britain, it is most strongly associated with Yorkshire, home of the celebrated ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, a geographical production area that connects Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford, where production started in 1877. This area lies in the shadows of the Pennines, which act as a frost pocket, providing the perfect weather conditions essential to the plant. The then sooty, sulphurous atmosphere caused by heavy industry was actually good for rhubarb as it encouraged it to die back in autumn. Yorkshire was the first place in the world where special sheds were built for forcing the crop. Local sheep farms provided an ideal source of natural fertilizer in the form of ‘shoddy’, strands of wool, naturally rich in nitrogen.
Indoor-grown rhubarb from Yorkshire is one of the jewels in our food heritage crown and rightly inspires great loyalty. In recognition of its very special nature, Yorkshire forced rhubarb is now one of a handful of British crops that have been awarded Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status by the European Commission, a scheme that recognizes foods that are unique within the European Union.
Will rhubarb break the bank?
At the back end of winter it’s tempting to rush out and buy forced rhubarb whenever it first comes on to the market, as welcome relief from the limited winter fruit selection. But it tends to be Dutch, and is often very pricey. Get carried away stacking up those stalks for the first crumble of the year, and you can get a nasty shock at the till because of its high initial pricing.
Yorkshire forced rhubarb starts out expensive too, but rarely as expensive as the first Dutch stalks, and it does come down a little in peak season. Outdoor-grown rhubarb – often more reliable for flavour – has the additional bonus of always being democratically cheap.