Call it late-season rhubarb if you like. The second cut, the autumn stalks, the one you nearly left in the ground. They go thinner than the spring crop and a shade more green than pink, but boiled briefly with sugar and a split pod of star anise they turn into something a maincrop batch never quite manages: a compote that tastes less like a crumble filling and more like a quiet savoury.
The method is twenty minutes, mostly unattended, and the yield fills three 240 ml Kilner jars. If you keep it in the fridge it holds nicely for a fortnight. If you want shelves, water-bath it following the Food Standards Agency's preserving-at-home notes and expect another three months of pantry life.
What you want from the stalks in November
The rhubarb you are after now is firm at the base and still has enough moisture that a pressed fingernail leaves a mark. If a stalk feels dry-hollow, leave it for the crown — it has already given what it can. Stalks under 1.5 cm at the thick end are kinder to the pan because they cook evenly; thicker ones need an extra minute and tend to collapse to threads.
Colour is less important than you would guess. The outside green on autumn stalks does not travel far into a cooked compote; after the first five minutes the whole pan goes a dusty pink anyway. If you want deeper colour, two of the thinnest forced stalks from the Yorkshire sheds (I keep a small packet in the fridge for exactly this) will tint the batch without changing the balance of flavour. Those forced stalks come out of the sheds by early January; by November you are strictly in maincrop country.
Weigh the stalks after trimming, not before. A thousand grams of rhubarb loses about 120 g to tops and dry bases, and your sugar ratio reads the smaller number.
The ratio, and why 40 per cent sugar
Most British compote recipes default to a one-to-four sugar ratio for rhubarb. I run 40 per cent, which looks heavy on paper but is fair to the stalks: autumn rhubarb is sharper than the first May pulls, and star anise reads as faintly bitter against undersugared fruit. Forty grams of sugar for every hundred of trimmed stalk keeps the compote jammy without turning it into a jam.
Caster is the straightforward choice. Jaggery or light muscovado turn the compote a shade darker, which is handsome on toast but flattens it as a porridge topping. I would avoid demerara here; the crystals never quite dissolve in a compote this short, and you end up chasing grit around the pan.
If you are cutting sugar on medical advice, drop to 30 per cent, add a quarter teaspoon of ground cinnamon with the star anise to carry some warmth, and expect a fridge life of a week rather than a fortnight. NHS guidance on free-sugars intake is at the NHS Live Well pages if you want a sense of where a jar of this sits in the day.
Method, to the minute
- Trim stalks top and bottom, discard the leaves (they are oxalic-acid heavy and not for eating), and cut into 3 cm batons. Weigh.
- Scale sugar at 40 per cent of trimmed weight. Tip rhubarb and sugar into a heavy-based pan — enamelled cast iron is forgiving, stainless steel is fine, do not use aluminium — and stir once.
- Split one whole star anise down the seam with the back of a knife so it releases its oils, and bury the halves in the fruit.
- Cover and set over the lowest heat the hob will hold. Do not stir. For ten minutes, do something else.
- Uncover. The pan should be a loose slurry with the batons still identifiable. Raise the heat to medium and cook uncovered for another six to eight minutes, folding gently twice. You want the stalks to soften without collapsing and the liquor to reduce by a third.
- Take off the heat, fish out the star anise halves (leave them in if you want it stronger), and ladle immediately into warm sterilised jars. Seal while hot.
The moment you can hear the sugar stop crackling against the pan is the moment the compote is almost done; from there it is forty seconds, not four minutes.
Three quiet uses, and one that surprises
On plain porridge, with a spoon of double cream stirred in after the compote, this is the best breakfast of a damp November. On Greek yoghurt it is no surprise but reliably good; on crumpets it behaves like a more grown-up jam and lasts a Saturday breakfast neatly.
The use that surprises people is alongside roast pork. Most pork-and-apple pairings drift sweet; a spoonful of this compote, warm, next to a slice of loin that has had its skin properly crackled, cuts the richness in a way apple cannot. The star anise is already a classic partner for pork in Chinese cookery, and rhubarb brings the sharpness that apple sauce reaches for with lemon. The method for pork belly on the BBC Good Food recipe pages is a reasonable base if you want somewhere to start.
If you have jarred enough for a second batch, try one with a pared strip of orange peel in place of the star anise and sugar at 35 per cent. It is a different compote entirely and makes the case for keeping two in the fridge.
Storage, labels, and a caveat
Fridge-kept jars want to be at 4 °C or below. Check the dial; some British fridges run warm on the middle shelf, and that is where a lot of compote and chutney goes south. Label with the date the jar was opened — not the date it was made — and finish within a week of first opening.
For shelf storage you need a proper water-bath process: ten minutes at a rolling boil in a pan deep enough to cover the jars, on a trivet to keep the glass off the base. The pH of this compote sits comfortably in the safe range for water-bath canning, but no home process is forever; aim for three months on the shelf, then use. Again, FSA's preserving-at-home notes are worth a read before your first batch.
And do not be tempted to ferment this one. Rhubarb's organic-acid profile makes it a strange candidate, and the star anise interacts with wild yeasts in ways that are more science fair than breakfast table. If you want a fermented autumn condiment, a small batch of cabbage with juniper is a better evening.
What I actually did with the last jar
I stirred the last spoon into the butter for a batch of scones on the Sunday the clocks went back, which turned them a soft pink and made the breakfast look like it had been planned. It had not. That is the quiet case for keeping a jar of this in the fridge in November: it rescues the morning you did not shop for.