As you may have guessed, this blog post is about Rhubarb. Technically speaking, Rhubarb as we know it today is a vegetable, but in practice it's fleshy stalk is used as a fruit. It's sharp and tangy so it needs to be cooked and have sugar added - perfect for jam as it happens!

Rhubarb is one ingredient which we are able to source almost entirely from our garden and those of our friends - once the plants have become established they seem to go bonkers, producing kilo after kilo of crunchy stalks long into the summer. We have a small patch of donated rhubarb surrounding our Bay Tree, and we set about picking it every time the Bay is in danger of being engulfed! We can reasonable expect to harvest 3kg every couple of weeks and as it freezes well when chopped, it soon adds up! 

Because the outdoor Rhubarb season starts in April (forced Rhubarb is even earlier) it represents the second plant to be harvested in a season and given a trend towards sharper, tarter jams we use in it two ways:

Raspberry and Rhubarb Jam, a combination which go together so well we have a posse of customers who seem to eat nothing else, and the thought of not being able to satisfy their craving when we are out travelling sees them stockpiling heavily in the spring!

Then there is our ever popular Rhubarb, Ginger and Elderflower Jam, a preserve which we tend to make a few weeks later in the season when the Elder flowers are in full bloom, spreading their heady spring time scent far and wide. Somehow the fusion of the Elderflower, Ginger and Rhubarb seem to be made for each other and let our customers recapture the fragrance right through the year.

Anyway, enough of all this rambling about Rhubarb, there is a small mountain of the stuff in the kitchen and I have some serious chopping ahead of me!