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Rhubarb pie is a pie that is made from the fleshy dark red stalks of the rhubarb plant, among other ingredients. This type of pie is especially popular in the places where the rhubarb plant is grown, particularly in the British Isles as well as in New England in the United States. One of the main other ingredients in rhubarb pie is lots of sugar that is used to offset the tartness of the rhubarb stalks.
Rhubarb, which happens to have poisonous leaves, can be a difficult plant to classify since its uses share common characteristics with many fruits while it is actually a vegetable. These characteristics mainly involve the use of the rhubarb in baked goods such as pies and tarts. The taste of the rhubarb stalk itself, however, can be characterized as extremely tart, an attribute that fruits are simply not known for. When used in baking, it is this tartness that allows desserts that are made with the rhubarb to be very unique compared to others.
A basic rhubarb pie generally will contain any of several variations of pie crust, rhubarb stalks, sugar, cornstarch and salt. Another reason for the popularity of the rhubarb pie lies in its simplicity to make, requiring few ingredients as well as instructions. Once baked, it ends up being rather sweet but also tangy.
There are many variations of the rhubarb pie. One of the most popular of these is the strawberry rhubarb pie, which adds more of a balance to the tartness of the rhubarb in its addition of strawberries to the pie. This balance makes this type of pie a little more difficult to bake from scratch since it becomes more debatable for discerning chefs over exactly how many strawberries and how much rhubarb and sugar must be used to achieve the “perfect” balance. This difficulty increases even more with other types of rhubarb pie, some of which include blueberry rhubarb pie, orange rhubarb pie, rhubarb custard pie, banana rhubarb pie and many more variations on this classic dessert.