Rhubarb Syrup

Dear Silvia from Candid Moments recently posted images of lilac syrup, which has made ​​me very envious, because I discovered lilac syrup last year and would love to make it again, only here in Munich, there is still no lilac blooming! Not to mention elder, my reference elder on my biking trail to work will need a lot more time, only the stupid snowball is in bloom. But there is rhubarb! A few years ago, I'd made a rhubarb syrup from a chefoch.de recipe and found it perfect to replenish all my lovely and lovingly collected bottles again! Every time I make syrup, I wonder again how much sugar it must contain in order to ensure good preservation. My  lilac syrup , the elderflower syrup and elderberry syrup always keep very well, at least a year, with a sugar-liquid ratio of about 1:1 or less sugar. The citric acid naturally helps preservation, too!

Ingredients for 4 L:

1.5 kg rhubarb,
1.5 liters of water
2 kg of sugar
Juice of one lemon
20 g of citric acid

Nutritional value: 200 kcal per 100 ml

Preparation:
Wash the rhubarb and cut it into pieces about 1 cm wide.

In a large pot, add the water to the rhubarb, bring it to a boil and simmer on medium heat until the rhubarb is soft (about 10 minutes).

Meanwhile, put the clean bottles on a grid in the oven and set the oven to 150°C. When the oven has reached 150°C, the bottles should spend about 10 minutes or longer in it to become sterile. Put the lids of the bottles in a small pot with some water to boil them, but do not turn on the heat yet.

Sieve the rhubarb mixture through a fine strainer, stirring and pressing with a wooden spoon to generate as much liquid as possible.

Pour the juice back into the pot, add sugar, lemon juice and citric acid and bring to a boil.

Turn on the heat under the pot with the lids on and boil the lids.

Let the syrup simmer for 5 minutes on low heat.

Fill the syrup into the bottles while it is still as hot as possible. I usually take one bottle from the hot oven, fill in the syrup, take the matching lid from the pot with boiling water, seal the bottle and continue with the next one.

I like to use small wine bottles with a screw cap to bottle syrup. A dear colleague has collected quite a lot of them for me ;-)
Cream bottle, as the two big ones in the middle, are also well suited and make a nice popping sound you open them again! But my personal favorite are the bottles with the plastic-wrapped cork, which I was allowed to take from a Greek restaurant after a dinner - but of course, I did not drinl all that Ouzo myself! ;-)

You can label the bottles with a waterproof pen and Washi-tape rather spontaneously.

Of course, printed labels look good, too!

Store the rhubarb syrup in a cool place. It tastes great with mineral water (2-3 tablespoons of syrup per glass), ice-cream, prosecco, the rhubarb fritters below and all other desserts ... and it is so pretty  and pink! :-)

From the rest of "rhubarb slush" I made rhubarb fritters, as suggested in a comment to the  chef's recipe, by adding ​​an egg, sugar, milk and a little flour and frying that batter in small portions in a pan.

Served as rhubarb fritters with the finished rhubarb syrup and some mint they were very tasty :-)

PS: I'm a little behind with the blogging, we now also have lilacs blooming in Munich - hurray! :-) In fact, they're nearly done blooming, but I did manage one load of rhubarb syrup in my parents' house today :-)