Old Fashioned Fresh Rhubarb Cake Recipe/Rhubarb Muffins (2024)

FAQs

What can I do with too much rhubarb? ›

Rhubarb is a truly special ingredient. With its vivid pink colour and distinctively tangy taste, it can be stewed, poached, roasted and puréed in a range of dishes as well as drinks. Use it in a comforting crumble, a classic syllabub, a fruity chutney or a zingy kebab sauce – the possibilities are endless.

You can freeze rhubarb raw, blanched or fully cooked. Regardless of which stage you choose to freeze at, the rhubarb will break down more as it defrosts, so it's best used in dishes where you don't need neat sticks of it.

Add unwashed stalks to a Ziplock bag and keep it unopened, or wrap them in plastic wrap and cut a few holes to help them breathe. Some air is needed to help let out the ethylene gas found in fresh produce so it doesn't ripen too quickly. Place stalks in the refrigerator's crisper drawer to help stay fresh.

Incorporating coffee grounds into the soil around rhubarb plants can improve soil structure, promote microbial activity, and enhance overall plant health.

Rhubarb leaves contain a poison called oxalic acid, so should never be eaten – cut them off and discard. Maincrop rhubarb can sometimes have tough, stringy ribs, so after washing it, strip these off with a small, sharp knife and slice the stalk thinly or thickly as required.

One of the most important properties of rhubarb is that it causes the pancreas to secrete insulin and hence reduces blood glucose level [22, 23].

Rhubarb is great for diabetics Rhubarb contains various compounds called anthraquinones. Two of these compounds have been found to improve the transport of glucose into our cells, so it's not hanging out in the bloodstream but is instead being used as fuel.

How do you preserve rhubarb for later use? ›

Spread a single layer of cut rhubarb on trays, freeze until firm (1 to 2 hours), then put in air tight bags or containers. Rhubarb may also be frozen with sugar or syrup. For a sugar pack, mix 1 part sugar and 4 parts rhubarb and allow to stand until sugar is dissolved before packing into freezer containers.

Rhubarb is one of the best things to freeze because you can use frozen rhubarb just as you would fresh. Because of the blanching step, the color of recipes made with frozen rhubarb will match the rosy color of the fresh leafstalks—and the tangy flavor will be just as terrific.

Sennoside A and other dianthrone derivatives are reported to be the active ingredients causing rhubarb's laxative effect (6). They are metabolized by β-glucosidase of enterobacterial origin and are converted into rhein anthrone, which produces the purgative activity.