The Best Rhubarb Crumble

The Best Rhubarb Crumble is the most perfect way to eat rhubarb, with a tangy-sweet fruit filling topped by a hearty, chewy streusel. 

While rhubarb, which looks like big ruby stalks of celery, is technically, botanically a vegetable, it is legally considered a fruit because most people treat it that way. It needs plenty of sugar to sweeten up the astringently tart, red stalks as they cook. But once you sweeten them, the flavor payoff is huge!

I learned to love it as a child while I lived in Pennsylvania, where people grew it in their gardens.

We can’t grow it in coastal Southern California where I now live (the winters generally don’t get cold enough) but while growing up my mother kept us in the rhubarb loop by simply stewing it every year. We ate stewed rhubarb on toast, on yogurt or cottage cheese for breakfast, or just standing at the fridge with a spoon. And her rhubarb pies…oh my, the memory! 

These days I rev up the rhubarb motor when I see it show up in my grocery store produce section in the spring. The last few years I’ve become particularly fond of The Best Rhubarb Crumble, which is just about the most perfect reason to eat rhubarb. I hope you try it! 

How to make The Best Rhubarb Crumble

For this crumble, we’ll be using

• Fresh rhubarb. How many rhubarb stalks will you need? It kind of depends on how big they are. As you can see in the photo above, 1 rogue stalk I got is the width of 3 fingers while the one next to it is a more average size! It’s more common for the stalks to be the size of large celery. If you run across super-wide stalks, feel free to slice them length-wise before you chop them width-wise. 
• Sugar
• Flour
• Butter
• Oats
• Brown sugar
• Cinnamon
• Almond extract
• Salt

Grease the baking dish. You know the trick of greasing it with the butter wrapper (if the recipe calls for butter), right? Simply remove the butter from the wrapper and use your hand to rub the butter-side of the wrapper all over the inside of the dish. If there’s no butter used in the recipe, you can always spray the dish with nonstick spray.

Chop the rhubarb into about 1-inch pieces.

Mix with the granulated sugar and a couple of tablespoons of flour.

Put the rhubarb into the greased baking dish. If there is sugar-flour remaining at the bottom of the mixing bowl, pour that over the rhubarb. Don’t leave any behind; your dessert will need it!

Mix the streusel together and put that on top of the fruit in the dish.

Bake it and let it cool before serving. Spoon it out into dishes and top with ice cream or whipped cream if you like. I like it plain.

Nothing stops me from visiting the kitchen to “even out the edge” when no one is looking.

Or to eat the leftovers for breakfast the next day. Hey, it’s fruit and oats!

Let’s make The Best Rhubarb Crumble, shall we?

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