how to preserve rhubarb Archives

Home gardeners who grow rhubarb know that once the plant establishes itself, you soon have too much rhubarb. We don’t have rhubarb in our garden, but both of our neighbours do, and neither one wants their rhubarb, so we harvest it all. Last year was the first year we tried to harvest all of it, as it’s usually too much to bother doing that. We ended up stocking away over 100 pounds of it in our freezers. I had to figure out pretty soon what to do with too much rhubarb.

Depending on your climate and your specific rhubarb plants, you may have already harvested yours or are looking at doing so pretty soon. For us, a few of our plants seem to be a month behind anyone else. When everyone else’s lilac bush is full of purple blooms, ours is just warming up for the season—and then when everyone else’s blooms fall off, that’s when ours looks gorgeously purple. Our rhubarb is similar—we tend to harvest it in July or August, so it’s more of a mid-summer crop for us rather than a spring one.

Here are some of the projects I undertake with rhubarb, as well as a few great ideas from around the internet that haven’t quite made it on this site yet:

Freezing rhubarb

The first and easiest is to simply freeze the rhubarb. It freezes well and holds together decently when thawed and frozen rhubarb is good for most uses. If you prefer to pickle rhubarb, you shouldn’t freeze it first because it will affect the texture, but for juicing, jelly-making, and alcohol uses, frozen rhubarb is fine.

After harvesting the rhubarb and chopping off the toxic leaf, I wash and dry every stalk, then chop them into one-inch lengths. I set them all out on a towel for a few hours to fully dry, then bag them up, date them, and freeze them.

Bags of chopped rhubarb ready for the freezer.

I’ve gone on to use this frozen rhubarb for juicing, kombucha flavouring, wine making, gin flavouring, and jelly making. My step-father likes to make rhubarb crumble and rhubarb pie and will use our frozen rhubarb for this and the results are just as good as fresh.

Rhubarb ginger gin

Of everything I make, this is by far the most popular. Rhubarb ginger gin is sweet and juicy with just a hint of warmth from the ginger and it makes for easy drinking. It mixes phenomenally well with Coke.

The process is simple—combine gin, rhubarb, sugar, and ginger in a large jar and let it sit for a month, then strain, bottle, and serve. You can find the full recipe and instructions here.

If you’re not a ginger fan, you can omit the ginger and make rhubarb gin. I’ve also done this and the results are a little sweeter.

Rhubarb schnapps

Not much of a gin fan? You can also make rhubarb schnapps. It’s a very similar process, but it uses vodka instead of gin. This recipe isn’t on my blog since I haven’t made it in a few years (as I’m much more of a gin drinker than a vodka drinker), but this looks like a great version here.

Rhubarb juice

Rhubarb juice cans easily. And if you have a steam juicer, that makes the process phenomenally easy.

This post explains how to extract rhubarb juice and safely can it.

Rhubarb juice is acidic enough to be canned as-is, but most people add sugar to sweeten it and balance the taste. For myself, I tend to use the rhubarb juice in other recipes (some of which are below), so I can unsweetened juice so I’m never unsure of how much sugar to add for the future recipes.

Rhubarb jelly

One such use of unsweetened canned rhubarb juice is rhubarb jelly. I will sometimes make rhubarb jelly for some folks that request it and the process is very easy when I already have pre-canned juice on hand and don’t have to juice the rhubarb as part of the recipe.

An easy step-by-step guide to making and canning rhubarb jelly can be found here.

Rhubarb wine

There are two staple wines I make every single year—dandelion wine and rhubarb wine.

Rhubarb wine is a great starter recipe for folks new to home winemaking. You can find a complete recipe with instructions here.

A bottle of rhubarb wine with two glasses that are half filled with wine.

While the recipe is easy to make as is, as the first step is to just dump sugar and chopped rhubarb in a bucket and let it extract the juice, I’ve found I get far superior flavour if I use the canned rhubarb juice I made. While wine made from rhubarb chunks is delicious, it seems the chunks sometimes add just a hint of bitterness to the final taste—but using only juice removes that bitterness and I’m left with a wine that is incredibly smooth, juicy, and delicious.

I may experiment with the rhubarb wine recipe a little bit this year. Last year after mis-understanding a recipe, I threw some ginger into a dandelion wine batch and ended up with a surprisingly delicious dandelion ginger wine—the ginger is just a background note but complements it perfectly. I suspect I’d get the same amazing result with rhubarb ginger wine. So if that’s a success, it will appear on this site eventually.

Pickled rhubarb

One of my favourite things to do in home preserving is to pickle things. I pickle cucumbers, hot peppers, beets, carrots, cauliflower, and more. Pickled rhubarb is one of those more surprising ones with a unique flavour and texture. You can find a good recipe for it here.

Dehydrated rhubarb

Every home preserver has their preferred preserving method. For me, it’s canning. But for some, it’s dehydrating. Dehydrating rhubarb is easy and because it shrinks so much (since a lot of what makes up rhubarb is water), dehydrating can be a real space saver if you have a lot of rhubarb. This site has easy-to-follow instructions, as well as some ideas of how to use your dehydrated rhubarb.

More to come…

As this site grows, I’ll come back here and update this list with more fantastic ways to use up your overwhelming rhubarb harvest.

Every year we’re faced with the same problem with the produce that we freeze—how the heck are we going to fit it all in the freezer?

Until last year, our freezer space was limited to our fridge freezer (we have a side-by-side fridge/freezer, so it’s a bit more room than a top-only freezer), a big chest freezer at my mom’s place, and (for emergencies only) my mom’s fridge freezer. Every year we try to preserve more and more with the goal of providing a year’s worth of food, and to do that means having the space and equipment. And those three freezers simply weren’t enough.

So, late last summer we bought a smaller chest freezer for our place…and quickly filled it up and ran out of room. About a month or so later, we bought a second smaller chest freezer, which we keep at my mom’s place. That did the trick for last year!

This year, though, we were faced with a record rhubarb haul—115 pounds—which is something we normally store in the freezer. We have SO MUCH frozen rhubarb. The big chest freezer was entirely rhubarb and nothing else, and half our fridge freezer was also rhubarb. We also juice cucumbers and freeze the juice, which filled one of our small chest freezers to the brim. It was fine for a while, but now as the peppers, Brussels sprouts, carrots, and more cucumbers are coming in—all of which go in the freezer—we were faced with the question of if we need to buy yet another freezer.

I was determined not to spend that money, so I thought about what the key problem is.

It’s the rhubarb.

We needed to get some of it out of the freezer.

We had to leave some as frozen rhubarb for my step-dad who makes pies every summer (so he’ll use this summer’s rhubarb for pies when he’s back next summer), we use some for flavouring kombucha, and we have some extended family that want some bags of rhubarb. But, in all, those uses account for maybe a sixth of what we have.

So, I started juicing.

A big batch of that juice went straight into a bucket for some rhubarb wine, but the rest I canned.

Canning rhubarb juice is quite simple and safe; rhubarb is acidic enough on its own that nothing is needed to make it safe for canning. Most recipes call for some optional sugar to counter the tartness of rhubarb, but it’s optional.

So, over the course of two days, I canned about 35 pints (17.5 litres) of rhubarb juice. Now the next challenge is to see if we use all that juice over the coming year, to see if it’s a useful project. I have some ideas of how to use it—but those are at the end of the post!

Step one: Juice the rhubarb

There are two ways to juice rhubarb—both are just as effective, but one is far easier and quicker.

Last year I bought myself a steam juicer. It’s a handy contraption of three interlocking pots—the bottom one boils water, and the steam gets vented into the top pot where the fruit/veg is kept. The steam heats the fruit/veg and eventually the juice bursts from it, dripping and draining into the middle pot. The middle pot has a drain hose built into it to drain the juice.

To juice rhubarb using a steam juicer, simply set the pots up, fill the bottom one with water, fill the top one with chopped rhubarb (fresh or frozen), and turn it on and let it do its work. I find it takes about 45 minutes for the rhubarb to fully juice with a steam juicer.

In the absence of a steam juicer, you can juice rhubarb using a pot on the stove. To do that, simply put twelve cups of chopped rhubarb in a pot along with four cups of water (and you can use this 4:1 ratio for larger or smaller batches). Simmer it until the rhubarb breaks down and the liquid turns a bright pink; this takes about twenty minutes.

Pour the pot’s contents into a jelly bag and let the juice drip out into a bowl or pot below. Let it drain for at least two hours and do not squeeze or compress the bag, or else you’ll get solids coming through and making a cloudy juice. In the absence of a jelly bag, you could likely use a wire mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth. It may take 1-2 hours to fully drain.

Canning rhubarb juice

Rhubarb juice is acidic enough for canning straight as is, but most recipes suggest adding sugar to improve the taste and cute down on the tartness. Knowing what you’re going to use the juice for would help determine if you want to add sugar or not. If it’s for drinking, then I’d recommend adding sugar. But if you’re going to eventually use it for jelly or other recipes that call for rhubarb juice, I’d recommend not adding sugar since the recipe is counting on the juice to be free of added sugar.

I chose to go with no sugar since I didn’t know what my final usage of the juice would be. Besides, I could always add sugar when I open it if I need to.

Safely canning rhubarb juice relies on the juice going into the jars warm, so start by heating the juice on the stove, bringing it to a simmer. If you’re adding sugar, now’s the time to do so, and give it a good stir to ensure all the sugar dissolves.

When it’s thoroughly heated, transfer juice to canning jars, leaving a quarter inch headspace. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with vinegar and then seal the jar with two part canning lids, screwed to fingertip tight.

Process in a water bath canner for 10 minutes, with the ten minute timer starting once the pot is brought to a full boil. The pot must boil for the entire ten minutes. When the ten minutes is over, remove the pot from heat and let it sit for five minutes. Then carefully remove jars using a jar lifter and place them on a thick towel on a table or counter overnight to cool and seal. In the morning, check that jars have sealed (lids bend downward). If they’re sealed, they can be stored on a shelf for a year or more before being consumed; if any jars are not sealed, put these in the fridge and use them first.

Using rhubarb juice

There are a number of uses for rhubarb juice that come to mind:

Use juice to make rhubarb ginger gin using my recipe here. Just pour in rhubarb juice instead of chunks of rhubarb. I haven’t made this from juice yet, so you will need to experiment with how much juice to add. It’s best to start with less than you think you need since you can always add more juice, but you can’t remove juice if you put in too much. This recipe alteration also lets you reduce the sugar if you want a dryer gin, since you’re not relying on the sugar to draw the juice out of rhubarb.

Use juice to make rhubarb wine. Instead of letting the sugar and rhubarb sit, just use rhubarb juice and all other ingredients (including sugar) in the same proportions. I’ve found rhubarb wine made from juice rather than letting rhubarb and sugar sit results in a much smoother and more pleasant wine.
If you added sugar to your rhubarb juice, you could drink it as-is or mix it with other juices for a tasty blend.
Whip up a batch of rhubarb jelly.

Make a batch of rhubarb simple syrup—equal parts sugar and rhubarb juice—and use it for tasty cocktails and youth-friendly mocktails. We’ve also used rhubarb simple syrup in place of plain simple syrup for other cocktail and baking recipes.

Rhubarb Juice

5 from 2 votes

Easy and tasty, canned rhubarb juice keeps the taste of summer fresh all year round.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 15

Cook Time 45

Canning Time 10

Total Time 1 10

Course: Beverage

Cuisine: American

Ingredients Equipment Method

Ingredients

12 cups Rhubarb, slice in small pieces
1 cup Sugar (Optional)

Equipment

Steam Canner (Optional)
Water Bath Canner
Canning Jars and Lids (Pint size or smaller)

Method

Juice the rhubarb.
With a steam juicer:
Load rhubarb into steam juicer and place on stove. It should take about 45 minutes for the rhubarb to fully juice. Make sure the pot at the bottom doesn't boil dry.
Without a steam juicer:
Place 12 cups of rhubarb and 4 cup of water in a pot. (Use this 4:1 ratio if you have more or less rhubarb.) Bring to a boil then reduce heat to a simmer; the rhubarb should break down in 10-15 minutes. Strain mixture using a wire mesh strainer or a jelly bag. Resist the temptation to squeeze the bag or press the rhubarb against the strainer as this will push solids through and you won't have a clear juice. If you leave it for 1-2 hours, it should fully drip through.
Transfer juice to a pot and bring to a simmer. Add sugar, if using, and stir until dissolved.
Transfer hot rhubarb juice to canning jars (pint size or smaller). Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Screw on two-part canning lids to fingertip tightness.

Process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. (Put jars on rack in canner and fill canner with hot water until jars are submerged by at least an inch of water. Bring pot to a boil and start the ten minute timer when it's boiling. The canner must boil for the full ten minutes; if it stops, bring to a boil again and restart the timer.) When done, remove from heat and let sit for five minutes.
Transfer jars to a thick towel on a counter or table and let sit undisturbed overnight. In the morning check that jars have sealed (lids are curved downward). If they're sealed they can be stored for at least a year before using. If any did not seal, put these jars in the fridge and use them first.

Tag: how to preserve rhubarb

What To Do With Too Much Rhubarb