Rhubarb: Fruit or Vegetable! It’s complicated…

Hi Friends…we are well into Spring, and oh how it messes with my mind. Spring is the recipe for chaos. One minute the sun is out, 70 degrees, and gloriously warming my face and soul, the next it’s 54 degrees, pouring down rain, maybe a wind storm on the way, blustery and feeling like Fall. These two are in cahoots. For all the craziness comes the beauty of long-forgotten, misconstrued vegetables that bring a renewed excitement about cooking and eating again. 

Enter Rhubarb! To me, rhubarb feels romantic, with its vibrant hot pink/Fuschia stalks, and a little old-fashioned. It’s not the vegetable everyone is running to the market to grab the moment the first spears hit the shelves. I don’t recall having eaten, or even seen rhubarb when I was a kid. And, I can’t tell you my first memory of it, but rhubarb has all the things I love, tartness, acidity, beauty, and a little bit of funk that you just can’t quite pinpoint. 

Now, most of us have probably thought rhubarb is a fruit, most iconically paired with strawberries, another delightful spring offering. And, when you do a Google search for Rhubarb recipes you get ​​36,300,000 results, with only 9,230,000 being savory options. That’s 27,070,000 sweet options that most people are searching for. Where’s the savory love? Botanically, rhubarb is a vegetable, and that feels right to me. 

I have grown rhubarb in my garden in the past, but, let’s be real, I am the only person in my house who gets excited about this spring offering. I mean if I turn it into a tart or cake it will most likely get eaten by some, but there is one, one that every year when the farm box starts delivering rhubarb, he starts to groan, my darling husband. And, every year, I try to figure out a way to make him fall in love with this regal plant. 

I have, some might call a problem, but I believe it’s more of a calling, to change people's perceptions of foods they believe they do not like. Maybe, they just haven’t had it prepared the right way, or in a way that is pleasing to them. Or, their palate has not evolved yet, and at some point, they will have that a-ha moment, and say, now I get it!

Up until this point, I have not had that moment with my husband, and I have tried. Oh! How I have tried!!! Sweet things, jams, bar-b-que sauce (to be honest, I wasn’t a fan either). So, I didn’t totally have high hopes this year, but I needed to give it a valiant effort, because I had a drawer full of rhubarb that I could not possibly consume all by myself, and the kids are mostly off doing their own things these days. But, I had a plan…

The plan started with our love for the Vietnamese Fish Caramel Sauce, it is divine, a little funky the right amount of sweet and savory, and the best sauce for wings, so I decided to play with that because citrus and tartness should be a good pairing. Instead of wings I opted for fatty Berkshire pork chops, and served it with aromatic cilantro jasmine rice, lots of green onion and soy glazed baby bok choy, and baby turnips. 

There were some mixed feelings when I gave him a taste of the sauce, loves the deep rich umami of the fish sauce caramel, but there was “...some tanginess?” he wasn’t sure about…rhubarb maybe?!? Ugh!!! This wasn’t going the way I had hoped, but it was 7 pm on a work night, and we were having this dinner regardless. 

So, I fired up the grill and got to searing off the pork chops, and then glazed them with the, in my opinion, delicious rhubarb spiked fish sauce caramel. The result was a deeply caramelized glaze, that added this glorious sheen to the chops, with crisped-up fatty edges. I pulled them off the grill and let them rest while charring the turnips and kissing the bok choy with some heat. 

The moment of truth had arrived and I was prepared for him to begrudgingly eat his plate of food. I scooped a nice bed of cilantro rice onto the plate and sliced up the best-looking chop. It was perfectly cooked to medium and glistened from the natural juices. I piled this on top of the rice, topped with a generous scattering of green onions sliced on a bias, some baby bok choy and turnips, and a small drizzle of additional sauce. At this point, he was enamored at the visual beauty of the plate, with the glistening pork and bright green accents… begging for this to be his plate! A couple of quick pics for Insta and I handed it over.

To my pleasant surprise, the continued caramelization that had happened while glazing on the grill had done just what I had hoped…and…he…LOVED IT!!! This felt like a huge victory and a recipe that I will be adding to my springtime repertoire. I winged these quantities with what I had on hand, so I may do some tweaking here and there, but this is a solid recipe, and would be great on wings, chicken thighs, all the chickens! It’s great on pork and would be fantastic for ribs. Would also be the perfect glaze for broiled fish like halibut, or black cod. 

I hope you enjoy it, and maybe convince someone you know to love Rhubarb too!