Strawberries and Rhubarb

One of the best thing about early summer in Niagara is the amazing bounty of fruits and vegetables that come into season. I’ve had asparagus at nearly every meal for a month, and love digging into fresh peas in their pods.

But maybe the ultimate seasonal treat is the combo of Strawberry and Rhubarb. Good strawberries are amazing and generally, I’m happy to just eat them out of the pint or slice them up and serve them with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

This weekend I made a trip out to Quiet Acres Farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake. They are an amazing little farm and just focus on what they have in season. I came home with some peonies, garlic scapes, asparagus, and the most beautiful strawberries and rhubarb I’ve seen in a while.

With so many I decided that I would make a couple of options, I took some of them and made a quick Strawberry Rhubarb crisp but wanted to do something a little more fun with the rest. Poptarts!

The key with the poptarts, or hand pies as they could be called, is that they won’t have the same amount of time to bake so instead of making a standard pie filling I needed to make a strawberry rhubarb jam.

I started by washing and slicing the rhubarb and berries, at about a 2-1 ratio strawberries to rhubarb.

I combined them in a ceramic pot, added a quarter cup of sugar, the juice of 1 lemon, 2 oz of Cointreau, and a pinch of salt.

Cook that mixture on low heat for 15-20 minutes until the rhubarb is soft. Taste it as you go and make sure that you’re happy with the flavours, depending on your fruit you may need a little more sugar or a bit more lemon to make the mixture balanced.

While it’s cooking take 10g of unflavoured gelatin and hydrate it in 2 oz of water. once the fruit mixture is where you want it add the bloomed gelatin and stir till dissolved. Transfer into an air tight container and refrigerate until set (4-6 hours at least).

While that’s setting you can put together your pie dough - I went for a classic 3:2:1 dough - 12oz of flour, 8oz of cold unsalted butter, and 4 oz of ice water. Combining the butter and flour till it resembles course sand, and then add in the water and working till the dough just starts to come together. Form into a disk, wrap it up in saran wrap or beeswax kitchen wraps, and refrigerate. Once your jam is ready to go roll out the dough and cut it out, you can cut into rectangles but I decided to go with 2 inch little circles. Lay out half the pastries onto a sheet pan lined with parchment paper or a silicon mat and then fill with 1.5 tbsp of your jam. I made a lot of jam so that I could have some leftover for my Sunday toast!

Then brush the outside of the pastry with an egg wash and then top with another pastry disk, seal the edges with the end of a fork, and cut a little cross into the middle to vent the steam. Then place the trays in the fridge to cool back down before pre heating your oven to 375 degrees.

Once they are cold and the oven is preheated brush the tops with egg wash and pop into the oven 18 - 20 minutes until golden brown. Cool and serve, either as is or with a dusting of icing sugar.