Ingredients
Some people add strawberries to rhubarb recipes for the sweetness, but I find the taste on its own is uniquely delicious!
- 80% Rhubarb
- 20% Sugar
- Whole vanilla bean
Directions:
Clean and chop the rhubarb; mix it with the sugar (80% of the weight of the rhubarb) – so any proportion you wish to make is easy to figure. Let it set in a large bowl for 4 hours so the rhubarb sweats juices with the sugar.
Then transfer all of it in a pot with thick bottom or if you own a copper pot or Le Creuset Marmite: even better. Add a whole vanilla bean split in half and bring to boil while stirring with a wood spoon so the bottom doesn’t stick. Reduce heat to medium and let it reduce by one-half. This should take you about an hour, depending on quantity.
Check the consistency on a cold plate. By this I mean put a dollop on a cold plate, give it a minute to cool, and this is the finished consistency. It will give you the ability to decide when to stop cooking for the consistency you like in a jam and you can decide how thick the jam should be.
Let the jam cool down a little bit for safety then poor the jam into jars of your choosing. Close the lids and store in a cool place like your wine cellar; this is what we do at home.
If you make a larger batch or want to keep longer than the few jars we make at a time, you can also can the jam, by using any simple canning or boiling process found on-line.
Bon appetit
About Rhubarb:
For your information, the rhubarb is a vegetable and not a fruit like most people would think (like me for instance). Quite honestly it, it was the ease in which the rhubarb grows in my garden that prompted me to start finding more ways to use the large quantities that were produced between mine and my neighbor’s gardens each year.
A hearty rhubarb plant will return larger and larger; year after year. When the stalks are ready to be picked, you have few solutions to utilize your harvest. Make a tasty dish for immediate consumption, keep it in the fridge for few weeks unharmed, chop the stalks up and sprinkle some sugar on them and keep them in the freezer in plastic bag for several month with no problem, or make yourself this delicious jam for the rest of the year. Some people add strawberries to rhubarb recipes for the sweetness, but I find the taste on its own is uniquely delicious!
