North Country Reflections

Yesterday, I was just starting the ritual fall clean up of the veggie garden, when…surprise…surprise… I noticed my rhubarb plants still had great looking leaves.

I know that any day now they will succumb to a hard frost, and the plants have no more need of photosynthesis this year. So I quickly harvested every last pink stem….about three pounds in all.  (The leaves are toxic and are always discarded).  And this morning I cooked up a batch of  delicious rhubarb sauce.

I think of rhubarb as a spring fruit (yes… I know that technically it is a vegetable but we all use it as a fruit…right!),  something that is traditionally combined with  June strawberries. So it was a bit of a jolt to have it as a fall delicacy.

Rhubarb is always really acidic, which in turn leads people to add a huge quantity of sugar to the cooking. For instance the recipe on Wikepedia calls for 4 to 6 ounces of sugar for one pound of rhubarb…which in my book is an awful lot of sugar.

So some years back…recalling chemistry lessons relating to buffered solutions somewhere in my distant past …I tried adding a tiny pinch of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to partially neutralize the acid in my cooked rhubarb. It worked like a charm, and I found I could slash the amount for sugar needed to make the dish enjoyable.

A downside is that this may also remove some of the Vitamin C, but these days I am more concerned with too much sugar in my diet.  It seems that so often life is about making trade-offs!

To cook 1 pound of rhubarb:

• Remove the rhubarb leaves. Clean the stalks and cut into 2 inch length.
• Cook in about a inch of water till soft.
• Add a tiny pinch of baking soda.
• First you will see lots of bubbles frothing up…let everything cook a little bit more until the bubbles subside.
• Now stir in about 2-3 ounces of sugar. I use either demerara or raw sugar.  Check the taste and add a bit more sugar if necessary.

The result:

A nice fruit sauce that uses about a quarter the amount of sugar than a conventional rhubarb sauce, to combine with our evening yogurt, .