A little sweet, a little sour? Sign me up! This Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble is a bright, fresh dessert that everyone will love. With barely any work in the kitchen you can have this fruity crispy crumble in less than an hour!
What is Rhubarb?
If you’re like me, you’ve had strawberry rhubarb pie in the past. Growing up, that pie was one of my absolute summer favorites. My grandmother would make it with homemade crust and top it all with crunchy turbinado sugar and if she didn’t keep an eye on me I swear I would have eaten a whole pie to myself. This recipe is actually an ode to that same pie and my grandmother. Upon deciding I wanted to create this crumble, I realized I had no knowledge what rhubarb was or where to buy it. I couldn’t really even tell you what it looked like!
Turns out, rhubarb is a vegetable that grows in large stalks and looks sort of like red celery. The stalk is the edible part; the leaves are best left alone since they contain dangerous levels of oxalic acid and will poison humans if ingested. The stalks are bitter and sour, not to mention very fibrous, so they need to be cooked to be enjoyed. Rhubarb goes way back in human history, having been documented thousands of years ago as a medicinal remedy for health matters in the lungs and liver. Fast forward to the 13th century to find rhubarb in the Middle East, and go even further forward to find it’s introduction to English cooking in the 18th century.
Rhubarb can be eaten any which way, but the simplest cooking method is to stew it with some sugar to balance out the sour and bitter. It can be made into jams, syrups, desserts, or drink mixer. Here in the Pacific Northwest it grows easily and abundantly in gardens, but you can also find it at farmers markets and produce sections. Typically the large poisonous leaves are already chopped off, so if you’re searching for rhubarb look for the red or pink stalks.
Ingredients
- Flour
- Oats
- Baking powder
- Sugars
- Lemon
- Butter
- Rhubarb
- Strawberries
- Cornstarch
- Salt
. Make sure to buy regular old fashioned oats, not steel cut or quick or instant oats. Old fashioned oats are the whole oats that are rolled and flattened, but quick are cut small before processing and instant even smaller. You want to use regular oats for between texture.
. Ideally you’d have all 3 types of sugar for this recipe, but if you don’t it’s alright to substitute with what you’ve got. I use raw turbinado sugar to give the crumble a bit more crunch in texture, but no matter what it’ll taste good.
. If you’re not sure what cornstarch is, it’s a thickening agent used in a lot of fruit desserts and Chinese dishes to encourage a thicker, gooier sauce. It can be found in the baking aisle.
How to Make This Crumble
Fruit Filling
The filling takes no cooking or melting. First chop the rhubarb stalks into medium pieces. Next, cut the strawberries into quarters by cutting the top off, placing it chopped top side down, and cutting it from the tip into halves then again into quarters. The result will be triangles. Mix the chopped fruits with lemon juice, white sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Grease a dish and pour it in, then with your hands disperse the cooled crumble evenly over the top. Bake it for about 35 minutes before letting it rest and cool a bit.
Crumble Topping
To assemble the crumble, pour everything but the butter into a medium bowl and mix lightly. Next, melt the butter gently, either in a pan or the microwave. If you microwave it make sure to put some kind of shield over the butter container so it doesn’t splatter the walls! Once you’ve melted the butter, mix it into the other crumble ingredients until it’s all uniform. It needs a little time to solidify, so pop it in the fridge or freezer to cool while you make the fruity part.
Helpful Tools
To zest a lemon, I recommend using a microplane of cheese grater with smaller holes. Don’t take all the fibrous tissue off the lemon, just that first bright yellow layer of rind.
Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble
Ingredients
Crumble
- 1 cup flour
- 1 cup old fashioned oats
- 1 1⁄4 tsp baking powder
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 1⁄4 cup raw/turbinado sugar, can substitute with brown sugar
- 1 lemon, zested
- 12 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
Filling
- 2 cups chopped rhubarb stalks
- 2 lbs strawberries, cut into quarters
- 1 lemon juice
- 1⁄2 cup granulated sugar
- 3 tbsp cornstarch
- Dash salt
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400°.
- In a medium bowl, combine flour, oats, baking powder, sugars, and zest.
- Melt butter and stir in until the mix is uniformly clumpy, then place in the fridge for 10-15 minutes.
- While the crumble gets cold, make the filling. In a large bowl, mix fruits, juice, sugar, cornstarch, and salt.
- Pour the filling into a 9x13 casserole dish and top with the crumble mix.
- Bake for 35 minutes until the topping is golden and the filling is bubbling, then let sit for 15-20 minutes.
Notes
- Serve warm with vanilla ice cream!
- Rhubarb and lemon are sour, so if you can’t stand strong sour flavor then try adding an extra 1⁄4 cup granulated sugar to the filling mix.
