If you're fed up with crumble cake and rhubarb compote, you might want to use the rest of your bounty rhubarb harvest elsewhere. Juicing the tart sticks gives you a healthy and tasty drink that you can even preserve.
Rhubarb juice is delicious and healthy
Peculiarities of rhubarb
Rhubarb is a grateful and undemanding garden plant. He only needs plenty of water, otherwise he is even satisfied with a shady location and any type of soil. When harvesting the rhubarb stalks, you have to make sure that the time is right: The cut-off date for the last harvest of the year is St. John's Day (June 24). This is because rhubarb produces more and more toxic oxalic acid over the course of a year. In summer the value is so high that the rhubarb is no longer suitable for consumption.
Suitable and inappropriate juicing methods for rhubarb
Experience teaches the home cook and gardener that not all methods of juicing are suitable for every fruit or vegetable. For juicing rhubarb, you can use the following recommendations as a guide.
Better not: Juice the rhubarb cold
Rhubarb is a very fibrous vegetable. When juicing with an electric juicer or an electric juicer, it can easily happen that the fibers get caught in the tools of the devices and these have to be constantly freed. This is extremely time-consuming and lengthens the juicing process.
Since rhubarb should be heated before consumption anyway to render the oxalic acid it contains harmless, hot juicing is preferable to cold juicing.
Two methods of hot juicing rhubarb
When juicing hot, you have the choice between a saucepan and a steam extractor. It's easier with the steam juicer, but juicing rhubarb in a saucepan has the advantage that you don't have to buy a new kitchen appliance. Either way, you can sprinkle some sugar over the rhubarb to sweeten the juice.
- Cooking pot: Wash the rhubarb stalks, cut them into two-centimetre-long pieces and place them in a sufficiently large saucepan. Cover the rhubarb pieces with water and cook them for 20 minutes. Pass the softened rhubarb through a sieve. To clarify the juice thus obtained, filter it through a cheesecloth. If you want to preserve the rhubarb juice, boil it again before filling it into sterile bottles and sealing them immediately.
- Steam Juicer: Place the washed and chopped rhubarb in the fruit basket of the steam juicer. Fill the bottom pot of the device with a little water, place the juice container on top and the filled fruit basket above it. Cover the steamer with a lid and place on the stove for about an hour. After this time, fill the resulting rhubarb juice into sterile bottles (this way it will keep).
The garden journal freshness ABC
How can fruit and vegetables be stored correctly so that they stay fresh for as long as possible?
The garden journal freshness ABC as a poster:
- as a free PDF file to print out yourself