What To Do With Too Much Rhubarb

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.

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.

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.