The Irish Way to Make Old-Fashioned Rhubarb Pie

If you've never baked with rhubarb, start here. It's bright, a little tart, and perfect for a simple pie. Hi, I'm Gemma Stafford, a professional chef from Ireland, and this is how we make rhubarb tart at home. We're going to prep the rhubarb, bring it together in a simple filling, and bake it in a buttery crust. So this pastry is a very special one if you haven't seen it on my website. It is sour cream pie crust. It is so delicious. It has lots of flavor, lots of fat, it bakes up beautifully, and it's a great complement to rhubarb. So it's really perfect for this recipe. It's simple to make. It's the same as any other pie crust. In my bowl, I have some all-purpose flour. You can use pastry flour too. Pastry flour is more expensive, so I just use regular flour. Here I have a little bit of salt, always with the salt. Next, like any other pie crust, goes in our cold cubed butter. Now, as you know, I love to use salted butter for that extra bit of flavor. I also use Irish butter or European style butter, which has even more fat and less water, which is really good for pastry because it causes less shrinkage. And when you are making pastry, please use your good quality butter because it makes all the difference. I love to use a new Irish butter called Truly that you can get in the U.S. It comes from the southeast of Ireland, and it is fantastic. So what you want to do is just rub in the butter with your fingers like this, or you can use a pastry blender, which I also really like to do because it eliminates the need for your hands to be in the pastry, warming up your butter and making it a little bit greasy. The key to pastry is cold ingredients. And I know that might sound like when you're in home economics and your teacher said, make sure all your ingredients are cold. It actually does really matter. Even your bowl, put your bowl of flour, dry ingredients into the fridge, butter, cold. As you can see, it's cold because it's coming in big lumps and not creaming, which is exactly what we want. And our sour cream is cold also. The reason you want your pastry to be cold is so your fat doesn't melt, which is really important. That can give you a greasy dough. But also when it goes into the oven, you want a cold crust going into the oven, creating steam and lovely flaky layers. Afterwards, it should look like this big lumps and small lumps. That is a beautiful looking pastry. Rubbing in technique is actually one of the first I learned in Ireland. So speaking of the Irish way, when I was very young, my mom showed me how to rub in butter into flour because I made crumbles a lot like a rhubarb crumble. So it's one of the first techniques I ever learned. So that's our butter. Now next, we're going to add in our sour cream. When it comes to sour cream, I would say full fat sour cream, fat equals flavor. And on that note, the reason why adding in an acidy fat and I'm talking yogurt, buttermilk or sour cream, I have a recipe for each pie crust and I absolutely adore them is because number one, more flavor, your pie crust is going to have more flavor, it's going to have more fat, which means flakiness in the oven. You can even see it on top of the crust when it's also less liquid. So when a pie crust has too much water in it, what happens with water in the oven, it evaporates. What happens when something evaporates, it gets smaller, it shrinks. Using less water or no water and replacing it with something like sour cream means you have less shrinkage because that's one of the biggest complaints when it comes to pie crusts. Now when you mix this together, you want to do it briefly, bring the dough together with your hands. And then what I find handy is just turning it out onto the surface and gathering up all those kind of dry bits. So we get everything hydrated. So dryer is actually a good thing. You'll see a lot of pastry chefs do very dry doughs. And it yields a very flaky, beautiful pie crust, which is lovely. And I'm somewhere in between because you have to still be able to handle us. But also, let me tell you what happens. We are going to flatten it out into a disc and wrap it in cling wrap and place it in the fridge. All pastry has to chill after it's been made. Two reasons to relax the gluten so it's easy to roll and it's not going to like pull back as you're rolling it. Number two to solidify the fat. Oh, number three. Number three actually is to hydrate any dry flour that might be in your dough. What happens when pastry goes into the fridge, it releases liquid as it relaxes. So if you're thinking my dough is a little bit on the dry side, do not worry, put it into the fridge, I guarantee you half an hour later when you come back, it will be fully hydrated. Lots of people worry that that's not going to happen. And then they add too much liquid to their pie crust. So you just have to be patient and know that chef's secret. Okay, lovely into the fridge for a minimum of 30 minutes. While your pie crust is in the fridge, it's a good time to make your filling. So rhubarb. Now I grew up on rhubarb in Ireland, it was a really common ingredient in baking. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous, ruby kind of a red color. And when it cooks down, it gets even redder, almost like kind of pinky. And it's actually not a fruit. It's a perennial vegetable. The thing about rhubarb is that it's kind of a weed. It grows anywhere. And especially in Ireland, it grew all around. And it has to be mixed with sugar and other kind of sweet elements to be able to be edible because it's totally not if you don't. So the filling is very simple, just like any tart we would make at home. If you remember, I made an apple tart. And it really is just the fruit and a few ingredients. So into our bowl, I'm going to add in some granulated sugar. In Ireland, we call this castor sugar. In America, granulated sugar is fine. So you can use it. Now rhubarb is very, very juicy. And that's why it stews really well. And my mom would often make rhubarb, stew it down with some sugar and have it with yogurt. It stews beautifully. And that's also why it is great for cooking. It cooks down really well. And because this vegetable releases a lot of liquid, we have to add in some sort of thickener. So I'm adding in cornstarch. You can add in a tapioca starch or you can use flour, but that's not gluten free, just in case. So we have a good bit there that's going to thicken the liquid that comes out of the fruit and the vegetable. It's my rhubarb pie filling, I am going to add some orange zest, which is not what my mom normally did growing up. But it really complements the rhubarb. They work so well together. And it just kind of brightens the flavor of the pie and adds kind of another element. So we're going to add that in there. And then just mix all these ingredients together until all of the rhubarb is coated with this mixture because this mixture is going to sweeten and thicken our filling. So I'm using one of my Gemma made bowls. I've been using them a lot lately and you can do it all in here. Okay, lovely. It's all coated. It smells lovely. I'm going to set this over to the side for a minute, it kind of macerates with all the flavors, a little bit of liquid might come out of your rhubarb even as it's sitting. So while it's doing that, I'm going to grab my pastry from the fridge and start rolling it out. So my pie crust is nice and cold. You can leave it for a minimum of 30 minutes. But honestly, you can make it up to like two days in advance. It also freezes really well. So I'm going to roll this out on my floured surface. You can see the big lumps of butter in there. Because the extra fat you might want a little bit more flour on your surface. So the pastry that I made is actually two crusts. So cut it in half. So you have one crust for the bottom and one crust for the top. So if you were to ask my son George, what's his favorite thing about visiting Ireland, it would be fruit picking. I know it sounds kind of funny. But when we go to Ireland, he picks so much fruit, blackberries, strawberries, blueberries. And my sister has a greenhouse. And last summer, he went up there to water all her plants. And she had tomatoes and she had I think strawberries and lots of cucumbers squash. She also had a rhubarb plant. He watered all of those for her and he was absolutely thrilled that he was given the job to do it. There also was a reward at the end of a fiver. I'm pretty sure that guy doesn't do anything for free. So you're going to want a nine inch pie pan or a tart pan. And this is super common. What we would have used growing up in Ireland is just a regular old Pyrex dish. I have to say there's something so old fashioned and lovely about them. I think I picked this up in goodwill. So I'm going to lay over my pastry into the base. And as you see I have extra and we're going to keep that there until we finish our edges. This pastry is really easy to roll. It's just a beautiful one to work with. So into this we're going to add in our filling. No need to blind bake at all. I know it's quite a lot of rhubarb but it cooks down a lot to give you the perfect thick amount of filling to pastry. Over the filling we're just going to add in some knobs of butter. That just adds extra flavor, fatty, sprinkle it all over the top of the filling. When you're filling this in, roll out your other pie crust. You can roll out your top pie crust to around nine inches because that is the diameter of the top. When I think of rhubarb in desserts, I think, you know, comfort food because that's what I had growing up, especially during the winter and the fall. And just really always reminds me of home and an ingredient that we had so easily accessible. And when you go to Ireland, you can go into supermarkets and even petrol stations that have hot food counters and you can find freshly baked apple tarts, rhubarb tarts, apple turnovers, everything like that daily. It's just a really popular and simple type of dessert that people have in their homes all the time. So that's my top crust. Here's what I'm going to do. I have some egg wash here for my egg wash. I actually take out the egg whites because it doesn't benefit at all with the browning. So I just do a little bit of milk and egg yolk. We are going to brush the edges of the pastry there so we can get the top layer to stick to it. And then I'm going to lay my pie crust top on. There's any little lips or holes, just smush them over. Feel free to press down on the top of that pie, encasing the rhubarb. So push the two edges of the pastry together so they kind of gel. This is my tip. That's the easiest way to get a smooth pastry edge. Use a scissors, leaving us a little bit of pastry to work with. So we can create a beautiful looking finish on the edge. OK, lovely. See the way it's nice and like all the way around. Also, any scraps, this is what my mom used to do. We give the kids the scraps, roll them out, but jam in the middle and make little jammy pockets. It was so delicious. For some reason, it was like the best thing. So you can crimp your edges any way you want. I've actually got a post on the website showing you how to do it different ways. But what I'm going to do here is just push like this, create a pretty uniformed look. It's just the back of a spoon. Once you have your edges crimped, generously egg wash the top and the rim. If you don't egg wash pastry properly, it will be very dry and kind of unappetizing. We want our pie to come out beautifully and shiny. For a classic rhubarb tart, you would sprinkle some sugar on top. Same with our apple tarts. You'd always have sugar on top. And then with a sharp knife, just create some slits in the pastry. And the reason we do this is to let out steam from the filling, not from the pastry, from the filling, because it's very juicy. It's going to bubble. Rhubarb bubbles up. It looks beautiful. So we want to give some space for it to do that. Beautiful. Our pie is assembled. What I like to do with pies is put it into the fridge for around 30 minutes to let the pastry get cold again, because it's really at its best when it's cold going into the oven. So sometimes I preheat the oven while it's doing that. And I slide it in there nice and hot on a tray lined with parchment paper. Do not forget this step because juices can bubble out of your pie and you do not want that on the bottom of your oven. You want to catch it in the pan. Also, baking on a preheated tray means that you have a really good chance of browning the bottom of the pastry and it not being soggy. So bake your rhubarb tart at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celsius for an hour or so. You'll know when it's ready because the juices will be bubbling. So you'll know the rhubarb is cooked underneath. So while it's baking, I'm going to answer some Bold Baking Hotline questions. And you've got some really good ones around rhubarb. One of the questions was, can I freeze rhubarb? And that's a great question because if you grow rhubarb, you end up with too much. What are you going to do with it all? The answer is yes. Here's what you want to do. Cut it up, flash freeze it. So put it on a tray, all flat, freeze it for like two hours, gather it up, put it into a bag. You can use it from frozen, straight into pies, straight into crumbles for stewing, whatever you like. Just know that frozen will release a little bit more liquid. And if you're making a crumble, that's OK. But sometimes with a pie, you might expect a little bit more juice, but definitely freeze fruit and vegetables. I'm all about it. The next question is why do strawberries and rhubarb go so well together? And if you want to go real full Irish on it, let me tell you something that my mom told me many years ago. What grows together goes together, which means that rhubarb and strawberries grow at the same season. They're the same timing. Rhubarbs are very tart. Strawberries are very sweet. And both of those complement each other. So just remember that what grows together goes together. I love this question because it allows me to brag about some of my recipes. What else can you do with rhubarb? Because often we just think crumble and tart. It's a great question. So on BiggerBolderBaking.com, yes, I do have crumbles and tarts. I also have a strawberry and rhubarb tart, which is absolutely delicious. I also have a rhubarb and ginger quick bread, and I have baked custard with roast rhubarb, which is just so decadent and lovely and perfect for spring and summertime. So any of those check out. But remember, you can also use it for compotes, for jams, for stewing, even in drinks, and some people even use it in barbecue sauce. So it has a lot of great uses. You know when your pie will be done because it will be a beautiful golden brown on top and the juices will be bubbling. I know it's tempting, but it's important to let your pie cool down before you slice into it. Compared to any regular tart, this is definitely next level. Using the sour cream pastry in this recipe adds flavor, adds fat, adds lovely texture and a little bit of saltiness. With those few additions, we have turned this classic pie into something really big and bold. When you cut this pie, you can really see how tender that pastry is. I like the generous amount of filling because you've got pastry on the bottom and the top. You can serve rhubarb tart with some custard, vanilla ice cream, or simply some lightly whipped cream. I really hope you enjoyed this traditional Irish recipe that I grew up on. If you want more, get comfy because I've loads more videos for you to check out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you back here again, same time, same place, next week with a brand new recipe.