Rhubarb Pizza ♥ Fun Summer Recipe

Today's fruit pizza recipe: A thin cookie 'pizza' crust topped with sweetened and reddened rhubarb. Surprisingly good!

"Is it healthy?" asked the first taste tester, age eight, upon learning that the rhubarb atop her slice of rhubarb pizza -- yes, you've read that right, rhubarb and pizza in the same sentence -- is botanically a vegetable. Uh. No. Rhubarb pizza is hardly a 'health food' but it sure is 'fun food'!

But hey, if laughter contributes to good health, that qualifies rhubarb pizza as health food, yes? Okay, not. Still, this rhubarb pizza was truly much fun and it ranks right up there with the recipes for Kool-Aid Pickles and Green Smoothies as outright food oddities.

The recipe comes from my dear Auntie Karen, who always writes when she collects a big pile of rhubarb from a good neighbor. So when I made the rhubarb pizza, using a recipe she shared a couple or more years back, I wrote her too, saying, "I finally made your rhubarb pizza! It's excellent!" Imagine, a few hours later, my surprise while flipping through a box of old 3x5 recipe cards: the exact same recipe, clipped from a magazine many years ago. Ha! The universes collide.

Rhubarb pizza tastes much better than it sounds. It's essentially a thin cookie topped with rhubarb, with the color and sweetness bumped up by a box of strawberry jello. It's very sweet, but the sweet-sour mix of sugar-rhubarb was oddly addictive. I was muchly glad it didn't last long since all the taste testers loved it, kids and grown-ups alike.

4TH of JULY RECIPES So if the blueberries had been worth buying on the 4th, I would have added blueberries for a red-white-blue dessert. But I couldn't figure out what to use for the white. Any ideas?

MORE FRUIT PIZZA IDEAS And hey, what about 'pepperoni' made from kiwi slices too?! This could get really fun, a good project with kids. Let's get creative!

RHUBARB PIZZA

Hands-on time: 35 minutes
Time to table: 3 hours
Serves a bunch

PIZZA CRUST
1 cup flour, fluffed to aerate before measuring
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small cubes
1 egg whisked with 2 tablespoons milk

TOPPING
3 cups chopped rhubarb, about 12 ounces
3 ounces red gelatin powder (i.e., strawberry Jello, raspberry Jello, etc. sugar-free is fine)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour, fluffed to aerate before measuring
1/3 cup melted butter

CRUST Preheat oven to 350F. Butter a pizza pan. (If yours has tiny holes in it like mine, use a tissue to lightly butter the surface, otherwise little bits poke through the holes and land ALL over!) In a bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt. With a pastry cutter or a fork, cut in the butter until the dough becomes quite crumbly and the butter is well-distributed. (The technique is similar to making a pie crust except that you want the butter pieces to get very small versus large for a pie crust.) Stir in the egg-milk mixture to form a dough. With your hands, press the dough onto the pizza pan, working slowly, wetting fingers a bit if they're sticky. (Because of the holes, I found it easier to roll the dough with a rolling pin first, but finished with my hands.)

TOPPING Top crust with rhubarb. Sprinkle red gelatin evenly over the rhubarb. Mix the sugar, flour and butter, sprinkle over top. Bake for 40 - 45 minutes until done. Let cool for an hour or more, then cut into pizza slices (or Imo's St. Louis-style, in squares, for smaller pieces).

NUTRITION ESTIMATE
Made with sugar-free jello, cut into 16 pizza slices, Per Slice: 158 Cal (31% from Fat, 6% from Protein, 64% from Carb); 3 g Protein; 6 g Tot Fat; 4 g Sat Fat; 2 g Mono Fat; 27 g Carb; 1 g Fiber; 13 g Sugar; 44 mg Calcium; 1 mg Iron; 116 mg Sodium; 27 mg Cholesterol; Weight Watchers 3 points

Made with sugar-free jello, cut into 36 approx 2" squares, Per Square: 70 Cal (31% from Fat, 6% from Protein, 64% from Carb); 1 g Protein; 3 g Tot Fat; 2 g Sat Fat; 1 g Mono Fat; 12 g Carb; 0 g Fiber; 6 g Sugar; 20 mg Calcium; 0 mg Iron; 52 mg Sodium; 12 mg Cholesterol; Weight Watchers 2 points

KITCHEN NOTES
Both Auntie Karen's recipe and my magazine recipe say that frozen rhubarb will work too. My sense is that it would be better to start with frozen fruit rather than thawing it first.

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MORE RHUBARB RECIPES
~ howt to make rhubarb jam, it's easy easy ~
~ Custard with Rhubarb Sauce, my favorite simple way to use rhubarb ~
~ Rhubarb Pie, 100% straight-up rhubarb pie ~

~ more rhubarb recipes ~
~ more vegetable pizza recipes ~
~ more recipes for desserts made with vegetables ~

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