Every spring I look forward to the first rhubarb from the garden, and each spring I seem to get more and more. This recipe is the result of an experiment with all that bounty that went really well. The yeast dough bottom, baked crisp and airy, is an excellent add-on to the soft and sweet rhubarb.

Pizza? For dessert?

It’s a pizza in that it is made with a quick yeast pizza dough, but the principle is much the same as the fruit flans you’d find in the south of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. The rhubarb is not cooked to a mush, but only softened, leaving whole chunks to make it look good. The chunks are put over a bottom of thin strawberry jam, which acts as the “sauce” of the pizza. When you use young rhubarb, you hardly need any sugar – well, at least I think so. And with a bit of cinnamon, it’s got that awesome flavour of my grandmothers rhubarb, in an updated form.

When my friends planned to come over from the States, I intended to make this for them. Cool, typical “updated” trad cooking from Holland etc. But then it turned out that language is a nasty thing – “she loves rhubarb” actually means quite the opposite, in English, apparently… On short notice, I swapped the rhubarb with kiwis, and the strawberry jam with gooseberry jam. Same procedure, same effect, totally different fruit pizza. And maybe even more terrific. That’s the thing with a good recipe: it works because of some principle, and if you stick to that, you can be creative with it.

Super easy, all it takes is just a bit of planning.

recipe: In season, sweet, and super easy: rhubarb pizza

This amount is for a 24cm round pizza tin
dough:

120 gr flour for pizza with yeast
60 ml water
2 tablesp castor sugar

topping:

250 gr rhubarb (about 4 long thin stalks without leaves)
250 ml water
2 tablesp castor sugar
2 teasp cinnamon
1 tablesp (cheap) strawberry jam

The dough

About two or three hours in advance, quickly mix up the dough, by adding the sugar to the flour, then carefully adding the water – as the amount of flour is so little, you have to be careful not to get it too wet. Knead well for 5 minutes, then roll out into a circle that will fill your pizza tin. If you don’t have such a shallow tin, put the circle of dough into another round tin – this to catch any juices that are going to come off the rhubarb while baking.

Put the dough into a plastic bag and blow into it to make it balloon up, so it doesn’t touch the dough. Leave this to rise in a warm spot – you could put it in the oven if you can set that to 40 deg C. for example. Leave this for two hours.

Wash and cut up the rhubarb into smallish chunks. Twenty minutes before dessert serving time, put the rhubarb in a pan with the water, and bring it to the boil quickly. As soon as the water boils, remove from the heat. Don’t let it boil to pulp! Drain the water into a cup, to save for later. Set aside the drained rhubarb to cool a bit. Soften up the jam in a saucepan with 2 tablespoons of the hot rhubarb liquid. If you have really thin jam, you don’t need to do this. Toss the cooled rhubarb with sugar and cinnamon. Start up the oven to pre-heat it to 230 – 250 deg. C. And you’re ready for assembly.

Cook’s bonus: awesome home-made rhubarb lemonade. Dissolve two teaspoons of sugar in the hot leftover liquid, and when cooled off enough, put it in the fridge.

Put it together

Get the pizza tin out of the plastic bag, and carefully spoon most of the thin jam onto it, leaving the edges free. Then arrange the rhubarb chunks on top of it. Use the leftover jam to drizzle over the rhubarb. Toss the pizza in the *hot* oven. Set your timer to 12 minutes. Wait a bit, shout “pizza!” when it’s done (sorry, Dutch-only joke I’m afraid).

When you get it out, the sugar content in the fruit makes this really hot, so leave to cool for a tiny bit before you cut it. This also takes care of too much moisture. This is also the moment to drop in extra’s like the white chocolate chips that I used. Those are not really neccessary, but look cool. Don’t add the white cholocate to bake with the fruit, as it will turn an unsightly brown.

This is best eaten hot and fresh. You could keep leftovers for a day in the fridge of course. But I don’t expect you to have any :)

April 23, 2010

mark as favorite0

retweet