A Variation of Rhubarb Sauce That is Delicious, Uses Less Sugar, and Takes Advantage of Our Surplus Rhubarb

This is baked egg custard topped with blueberry-rhubarb sauce

In the comments the other day, Allie was asking about a recipe for blueberry-rhubarb sauce. Here is how I make rhubarb sauce that gets devoured in my house.

My rhubarb sauce follows 4 points to reduce the sugar, the tartness, and the intensity.

• I mix with berries, about 1 part berries (frozen or fresh) to 3 parts chopped rhubarb. Blueberries are our favorite, but blackberries and strawberries are also yummy in rhubarb sauce. When I see blueberries at Dollar Tree in the freezer section (10-oz bag for $1), I scoop up several bags and hoard them at home until I find something special in which to use them. I was inspired to try blueberries in rhubarb sauce after a comment in my early blogging days.
• I reduce the amount of added sugar by stirring a bit of baking soda into the sauce. When the fruit has cooked to a mush, I stir in about 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda. The reaction causes a gray foam to bubble up. This is stirred down quickly and the gray color disappears. After the baking soda, I then add the sugar to sweeten, using taste as my best judge. Every 1/4 teaspoon of baking sugar has the ability to lessen the need for sugar by about 1/3 cup. When I'm really conserving on sugar, I add even more baking soda, a pinch at a time, again using taste as my guide. I wrote more about using baking soda to reduce tartness in baking and cooking in this post.
• I thin the intensity of the rhubarb with a slurry of cornstarch in water, which is stirred in after sweetening the sauce. About 2 tablespoons of corn starch stirred into 1/2 to 2/3 cup of water, then added to the rhubarb sauce and cooked until thickened will do the trick.
• Finally, at the very end, I add about 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract (imitation works fine). The vanilla has a warming effect on the flavor of the rhubarb. Vanilla is a delicious counterpoint to sweet and tangy rhubarb concoctions. I love it in rhubarb jam, too.

Free Nutrients for My Vegetable Garden

This is about a dozen egg shells ground to a fine meal. Egg shells contain calcium, a mineral that some vegetables need to thrive and inhibit disease. As I use eggs, I rinse the shells and set them aside until I have about a dozen. They dry over the course of several days and then are easy to pulverize.*

When I have enough, I mash them quickly with a potato masher, then run them through the food processor until the particles are fine. Some of the particles are as fine as dust, so I let them settle for a few minutes before taking off the lid.

Finally, I stir a tablespoon into the soil where I'm transplanting a seedling, along with whatever else I'm adding at the time. In the case of this batch of eggshell meal, I also added epsom salts, as I was transplanting tomato seedlings. Epsom salts are an available source of magnesium, a nutrient that tomato plants need along with the calcium.

It's free. It benefits my vegetable production. And it does something useful with the eggshells.


*Damp eggshells don't pulverize into a meal very easily. If using freshly rinsed egg shells, it's best to dry them in a warm oven on a baking sheet for about 30 minutes, like right after you take baking out of the oven, and the oven is still hot to warm.