It has been a cold spring. Until today my winter blanket was still on the bed, the heater in the living room continued to kick on occasionally and some mornings we still started a fire in the kitchen wood stove. Most of my garden seeds germinated then went into a waiting phase, putting their energy into staying alive rather than growing. We even had a light frost a couple of days ago! But I cautiously think summer weather may be here to stay, at least until that August frost that sneaks up on us just when we’ve let our guard down.
A cold spring though doesn’t fizz on some hardy plants. Once well established you can always count on a crop or two of rhubarb. My two plants were huge so I decided to pick and chop all the larger stalks to make juice, leaving the young and tender ones for rhubarb preserves, cakes, pies, bars, strawberry/rhubarb jam - whatever I get up the energy to make. This picking yielded about 10 gallons of chopped rhubarb.
I tried a slightly different method of processing this time.
- Chop - this I do sitting on a chair in the garden with a giant bowl on the ground and a sharp butcher knife. Pick, whack off the leaves, and slice slice slice, running the knife lengthwise on the large stalks to make smaller chunks.
- Take the leaves to the compost.
- Wash and freeze the diced rhubarb to break down the fibres.
- Thaw, adding about a quart of sugar per 5 gallons to help draw out the juice
- Wait a day.
- Steam the rhubarb in smaller lots in a juicer/steamer. Add 1/2 cup of sugar per litre to the resultant juice and heat to thoroughly dissolve.
- Wash an estimated number of quart jars.
- Take the depleted mushy rhubarb that’s left to the compost.
- Process juice* in a pressure canner, 5 lbs, 5 minutes.
- Remove jars from canner, set on a rack and cover with a tea towel while they cool.
- Clean up pots, juicer, canner, spoons, ladle, funnel, etc.
- Check the jars for seal, wipe the outside with a damp cloth, write the year on the lids and store.
I’ve been doing this for days and still have more to go. But the juice is worth the effort. Each quart is a concentrate. When we want to drink some I add 2 to 4 cups of water to the contents of each jar (decided by a taste test). The juice can also be used as a concentrate to make wine but, since rhubarb wine is not one of my favourites, I’m thinking of trying a hard cider for the first time. I recently tried a commercially produced rhubarb cider and it was both delicious and refreshing, with the added benefit of being sweeter and having less alcohol than wine. If my rhubarb cider turns out good and we get lots of crab apples this year I might make apple cider too. The apple juice I make with a press, a fun process.
*If I don’t have enough jars of juice to completely fill my canner I make “spacers” using jars of water with old lids. These spacers ensure my jars won’t topple over during processing. I use some vinegar with the water in my spacer jars and in my canner because I have hard water which will coat the jars inside and out with calcium/lime scale - not pretty or fun to clean. I recently purchased a bag of food grade citric acid. I’m thinking of using this instead of vinegar to control the calcium/lime scaling. It works good to clean my tea kettle and my stainless steel sink. The biggest problem I have with it is determining the proportion of water to citric acid powder when using as a cleaner/descaler. I can’t seem to find any formula for this and would appreciate feedback if anyone can help.
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June 20, 2024
