Sweet and Sour Rhubarb Tart

Interestingly, I started reading up about this Chinese medicinal plant because of this French dessert. First tasted Rhubarb tart in France, would only say that it left an impression on me due to its sour taste.

It's curious who would first think of cooking this sour vegetable as a sweet dessert, especially as it has been used as laxative for over 2,000 years and has poisonous leaves.

Known as 大黄, large doses of the Chinese rhubarb is used to treat constipation, while small does amazingly have the opposite effect of treating diarrhea. I can imagine the word 大黄 being inscribed on every traditional Chinese medicine cupboard but I'm not sure if it is ever used in Chinese cooking.

The garden version used here is supposedly much less potent in terms of causing toilet visits, but I wouldn't imagine binging on rhubarb tart now that I know its medicinal wonders. Only the stems are used, and it looks somewhat like celery stem dyed red to me.

Rhubarb Tart
serves 6

1 tart dough (pâte brisée)
1 kg of rhubarb
50g sliced almonds
2 tablespoons of semolina flour
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
6 tablespoons of sugar

Flatten the dough and line onto a prepared tart tin. Keep in freezer for 30 minutes.

Pre-heat oven at 180C. Peel the rhubarbs and rinse them. Dice.

Pour half the quantity of sugar onto the tart base, then sprinkle with almonds and top with flour. Lay rhubarb all over.

Top with remaining sugar and bake for 45 minutes.

Serve warm or cold.

Tricks from Rémi (well, as with most tarts, I didn't cook this, especially since rhubarbs are foreign to me until now):
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- As rhubarb is sour, be more generous with sugar if you have less tolerance for sour taste.
- Be generous with the quantity of rhubarb, it must be tightly packed on the tart to prevent the rhubarb from drying out. Rhubarbs are supposed to release juice when cooked, giving rise to a juicy tart. Quantity of rhubarb could have increased for the picture shown above (our rhubarb in stock didn't add up to 1kg, as indicated in recipe). Also, our rhubarb was one week old, so a bit dried out too.

Recipe comes from Les Classiques de Camille. Watch out for more French classics from her.