Nigel Slater, TV cook, bestselling cookery author and food columnist for The Observer, has joined the RHS grow your own campaign.
In his new series for 2009, Nigel focuses on the best produce for growing and cooking.
Next month: lettuce
Nigel's rhubarb recipes
Discover Nigel's rhubarb recipes:
Rhubarb
The crimson buds of rhubarb are eye catching among the dark blue-greens of the winter vegetable garden – a cheerful reminder that there is more than I might think going on under the cold, wet soil.
My crown of ‘Timperley Early’, a cultivar chosen for its traditional knife-sharp flavour, sits in a sheltered corner close to a yew hedge, sending up its first shoots around the same time the snowdrops come into flower – a tempting sight in what is a low patch for any gardener-cook.
Rhubarb is among the easiest of fruit (though technically a vegetable) to grow at home. Shoots from my eight-year-old crown pop up each year like a reliable old friend. Apart from a deep winter mulch of well-rotted manure (it has an appetite for nitrogen) this is one garden edible that asks almost nothing of me, and I appreciate it for that. I harvest the thick, green-and-red-freckled stalks throughout spring and early summer, using them in fools and pies and occasionally with grilled mackerel.
Delicate forced flavour
The finest-flavoured early stalks are those that have been forced, in other words induced to provide an exceptionally early and tender crop.
At home this means little more than placing an old bucket over the crowns to block the light and keep the new shoots protected. Hand-made terracotta rhubarb forcers are a rather beautiful and romantic (if expensive) alternative, redolent of old kitchen gardens, but you need to remember to lift the top as the tips approach. Keeping the buds cosy and dark is essential.
Commercially, forced rhubarb is grown in heated, windowless sheds mostly around Wakefield in Yorkshire, an area known as the Rhubarb Triangle. In order to prevent the light from infiltrating the sheds and sending the pale yellow leaves green as they unfurl, the stalks are picked by candlelight. Choose the right night to visit and you can hear the whispered crackle of the leaves unfurling. These Wakefield growers have long been cheering up cooks looking for home-grown fruit at a time when all else on offer seems imported.
In the kitchen, early forced rhubarb is often considered to be superior to the chunkier stalks of the summer crop, having a more delicate flavour and less acidity. I am happy with either, having enjoyed rhubarb since I was a kid, when I would sit on the back steps dipping the raw stalks into a cup of sugar, shuddering at its shocking tartness, then going back for more.
The colour varies from rose-pink to deepest blood-red. ‘Stockbridge Arrow’ (bred in the 1960s, in Yorkshire) and ‘Raspberry Red’ (a relatively recent introduction) are especially crimson, though the latter is on the sweeter side.
I prefer to think of the two crops as suitable for different treatments, and appreciate the early crop for its gentle sharpness, the later one for its firmer texture. I use the forced stalks for a breakfast fruit, baked with a little honey and eaten with yoghurt, though all cultivars are suitable for a classic rhubarb crumble.
Simple treatment
The delicate nature of the induced rhubarbs available early in the year means they cook much more quickly than the thicker stalks that have been left to grow in the sun and rain. They can be cooked in 10 minutes or so if you simmer them gently on the hob with sugar and a couple of tablespoons of water; twice as long if you choose to bake them, when their flavour often seems more intense. My favourite is to roast them with a little sugar and the juice of an orange.
For the bought, forced stalks and my own early crop – each stalk tugged gently but firmly from its moorings – I take the purist option, cooking them as simply as I can so the sharpness dings out loud and clear. A little sugar is their only embellishment. Later, I might add some of the darker sugars such as light muscovado or demerara, orange zest, vanilla or orange-flower water. The latter give a faintly Middle Eastern touch.
As the season progresses the stalks can be baked or poached (but never the leaves, which are poisonous in quantity), then cooled and crushed before folding into lightly whipped cream to make a fool. I like to crush the fruit with a fork and mix it only briefly with the cream. In a more contemporary vein, I like to use the firmer, late-season stalks in a tart, layering the cooked and drained chunks of fruit on a strip of lightly cooked puff pastry. I return the tart to the oven until crisp and brown, then brush the rhubarb with melted apple or redcurrant jelly.
I don’t think enough is made of using rhubarb with meat and fish. A purée of green summer stalks cuts through the rich flesh of roast pork or oily fish like a newly-sharpened knife. Do try it with sausages, too. The older cultivars, such as ‘Victoria’ (introduced in 1837), are especially good for this, having been bred at a time when a little sourness was well appreciated. I also like rhubarb with duck. Not such an outrageous one when you think that bitter oranges are used in the classic duck à l’orange. A mound of almost unsweetened rhubarb next to a crisp leg of roast duck can be a splendid way to use up the stalks before they become too tough for a fool or tart.