How To Make Incredible Amish Sour Cream Rhubarb Bars

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Rhubarb is a staple on Amish farmsteads. It's one of the first spring vegetables that come up and is one of the first to harvest. The long stalks and billowing leaves (which you should not eat) make a rhubarb patch easy to spot.

Jump to:

• 🥝 Is Rhubarb a Fruit or a Vegetable?
• 🚜 How to Harvest Rhubarb
• 📋 Step-by-Step Sour Cream Rhubarb Squares
• 👩‍🍳 More Amish Rhubarb Recipes
• 🖨️ Full Recipe

🥝 Is Rhubarb a Fruit or a Vegetable?

Sometimes it is tough to wrap around my head that rhubarb is a vegetable because it is so often associated with desserts and used in the same way fruit is used. For instance, here are some popular uses for rhubarb:

• jams and jellies
• filling for coffeecake
• A dessert filling for crunches, bars, and cakes
• rhubarb juice

See, those don't like vegetable uses, right? But rhubarb is a very versatile vegetable which can make it somewhat a chameleon in its uses and appearance. These sour cream rhubarb bars were the featured recipe in one of The Amish Cook columns in May 2024.

🚜 How to Harvest Rhubarb

If you are able to get your hands on some fresh rhubarb, everything that I have read - and this worked just fine for me, is grab the stalk and twist it off. Remove the leaves after you have picked it. Rhubarb leaves are toxic, especially for pets (but humans should stay away from them too), so to be perfectly safe, remove the leaves before you even go into your house.

Then wash the stalks and you're good to go. How you are using the rhubarb will determine what you do with the stalks. For this rhubarb squares recipe, I just diced the stalks up before boiling them in a filling.

📋 Step-by-Step Sour Cream Rhubarb Squares

This recipe is super easy and while the final product may not win a beauty contest, it certainly passes the taste test. And if you were not super rushed like I was, you'd probably make it look even nicer than I did.

So, your first job is the tedious one of chopping and dicing the rhubarb. My problem is I'm not patient enough to do it in really small, fine dices, so I chopped my up into larger chunks. Gets the job done faster, but it turned out fine. The rhubarb cooks down anyway when you do the filling. So you can see above that I just sliced the stalks into bite-sized pieces. If you aren't someone that likes the texture of rhubarb, then you smaller bits.

Cook the rhubarb on top of the stove, the rhubarb and all the other filling ingredients like the egg yolks, and sour cream. The recipe calls for clear-gel and use it if you can find it, but otherwise cornstarch worked fine as a thickener.

Before you start cooking the filling you can preheat your oven to 350 and mix up the crumb/crust recipe, pat ⅔ of it into the bottom of a baking pan and then when it comes out of the oven the filling will be ready to pour onto it. I only let the filling boil about 5 minutes, as the instruction says, I think if you go much over that you'll start to scorch the filling and that would not taste good.

When mine came out of the oven they looked something like the photo below.

I probably overdid it on the oats. The bars will cut cleaner if you don't do that. I also, just FYI, realized just as I was beginning the recipe that I was completely out of white flour. But I did have whole wheat flour, so I used that and they turned out fine, although maybe they are a darker color because of the wheat flour.

I chilled the bars overnight in the refrigerator and then cut them into bars and I think that worked better. Man, if you like rhubarb, and even if you don't like rhubarb, these are really good!

👩‍🍳 More Amish Rhubarb Recipes

Amish Rhubarb Pudding

Amish Schoolhouse Rhubarb Dessert

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake

Rhubarb Squares

🖨️ Full Recipe