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Easy Chai Spiced Rhubarb Blueberry Sauce is sweet, tangy, and has a subtle hit of warm, comforting Chai tea. Roasted to perfection, this sauce is the ultimate lazy summer dessert. Gorgeously fresh, vibrant, and bright, it’s the perfect dessert you can freeze for whenever you need a summer berry fix. Made with Suttle Tea from Sisters Oregon and Battle Ground blueberries and rhubarb, it’s a beautiful blend of flavors from southwest Washington and central Oregon. Intrigued?? Keep reading to find out more!
Summer in Battle Ground is a bountiful season. Berries grow in huge abundance to the point where you have blueberries out of your ears! Due to high amounts of rain each spring, and warm summer days, our berries have the perfect temperature to grow sweet and juicy! It’s a flavorful and fun time of year!
Great Grandma’s Recipe
Growing up, summertime meant nostalgic, easy fruit desserts. A yearly classic came with the advent of fresh rhubarb popping up in big leafy patches in backyard gardens. My mom always made rhubarb strawberry pudding. Passed down by memory from the depression-era kitchen of my German Great-grandma Frantz in Ohio, this rhubarb strawberry pudding was insanely tangy, sweet, and full of mouth puckering, bright flavor. I loved eating it plain or with angel food cake! (Probably not how they ate it during the Great Depression, but it tastes amazing that way!)
In honor of the most prevalent berry in Battle Ground, I decided to spin off of Great-grandma Frantz’s traditional recipe and make an easy chai spiced rhubarb blueberry sauce. Roasted in one pan, it’s a fantastic dessert you can pair with ice cream, eat over fluffy cream biscuits, or decadently smother all over angel food cake. Freezer friendly, stockpile your summer fruit haul in a fun way for winter!
The Suttle Tea Challenge
I LOVE the local food purveyors in the Pacific Northwest. They take local ingredients and make pure magic happen! This summer I set myself the challenge of creating recipes that spotlight locally made ingredients. Let’s start this off with a trip to Suttle Tea in Sisters, Oregon.
Imagine a gorgeous blue bird summer day in Sisters, Oregon. The high desert temperatures can easily reach over 100 degrees. Relax under the cover of huge shady trees and listen to the comforting sound of ice rattling in a sweetly fragrant drink. Inside the shop, scents of cinnamon, cardamon, chamomile, and lavender waft through the air. There’s plenty of nooks to sit at, and the overall ambiance is calm, cool, and relaxing. This is the best tea spot I’ve ever found called Suttle Tea!
Suttle Tea is a picturesquely cozy tea house that specializes in loose leaf tea blends made with high quality local ingredients. I am obsessed with the beautiful aromas and uniquely addictive flavor profiles they have. Because they use herbs and flowers, the tea itself is absolutely beautiful! If you ever have the pleasure of visiting Sisters Oregon, go check them out! Their boba tea is phenomenal! Try out the lemon silk boba with coconut milk, or the root beer boba tea. In the winter, the warm tea lattes are the perfect pick me up against the snowy weather! If you are dying to try this recipe but can’t stop for a visit, they have an online shop too!
FYI: This post is not sponsored…I just really love Suttle Tea! 🙂
Sisters Chai
One of Suttle Tea’s trademark blends is the Sisters Chai Black Tea. A warm spicy blend filled with notes of cinnamon, star anise, cardamom, coconut, vanilla, and spicy peppercorns, their Chai tea makes a pretty delicious latte! However, what if you add it to your baked goods or desserts? Adding Chai tea to my rhubarb and blueberries added a Suttle (see what I did there? 😉 ) hint of warmth. It contrasted perfectly with the sweet and tart making this simple sauce something truly special. It’s the perfect spice blend for a mid summer dessert when Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes are whispering in the background.
Will Any Chai Tea Work?
Of course, you can use any other loose leaf Chai tea if you don’t have Suttle Teas on hand. However, the flavor may not be identical to mine. No matter what, it will be delicious! If you go looking for a different Chai tea, try using Chai that has similar ingredients. Loose leaf is best. If you use bagged Chai tea, you might need to add more tea bags so the strength is the same. Try it out and let me know if it works!
But the biggest question is, how do you add tea to desserts???After a few fails, I figured out a foolproof way to add this gorgeous ingredient into my easy Chai spiced rhubarb blueberry sauce.
Reusable Tea Bags
First, lets talk about the fails….cause learning comes with trial and error!
Fail #1: I tried steeping tea extra strength….way too watery, no major difference in the taste, and used a lot of tea!
Fail#2: I tried adding it in directly and straining it out…messy and I accidentally bit down on a peppercorn!!! bleh!
Fail#3: I tried steeping tea in butter….umm it was gross and disgusting….don’t do that…that’s a bad idea! It also wasted a lot of tea, and loose leaf tea is not cheap!
Success!! The best way to add tea to berry desserts like jam, compote, or puddings is to steep it in a reusable tea bag while you are cooking and then letting it steep for a while. I got my reusable cloth teabags off Amazon. They are washable, reusable, and very simple to use! Alternatively, you can use cheesecloth tied up in a bundle, but that was messy and cheesecloth strings kept getting into the dessert. I didn’t like using metal tea strainers because that was messy and I wasn’t sure if they could go in the oven.
Roasting Is The Way To Go
I tried stewing and roasting. Between the two, I preferred the roasting method. Roasting removed more of the excess liquid which made the sauce less watery and helped bring out the natural pectin in blueberries. Letting the tea steep while the fruit slowly roasted in the oven helped infuse the spices into the sauce gorgeously. I loved how simple it was to throw everything into one pan and let it do it’s thing. The clean up was very easy!
Fresh or Frozen?
The beauty of this recipe means you can make it year round (as long as you can find rhubarb.) Fresh and frozen blueberries both work perfectly. Once finished, don’t forget to freeze the leftovers! Chai spiced rhubarb blueberry sauce keeps well. It will be a refreshing reminder of summer when the cloudy days and constant rain hit Battle Ground in the fall.
Are you ready to make a delicious, easy, freezable dessert? Let’s do this!
Happy eating!
Easy Chai Spiced Rhubarb Blueberry Sauce
Equipment
- 1 9×13 pyrex pan
- 1 reusable linen teabag
Ingredients
- 4 cups rhubarb, cut into 2 inch pieces. Depending on rhubarb stalk size this can vary between 4-6 stalks
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 2 1/2 tbsp Sisters Chai tea Any loose leaf Chai tea blend works too
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
- 1 pinch salt
- 4 cups blueberries fresh or frozen work
- 2 tbsp cornstarch
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 tbsp butter
Instructions
- Set your rack in the middle and preheat the oven to 425℉. Cut your rhubarb into 2 inch pieces. I like trimming off the ends and peeling the outer layer of the stalks prior to cooking. Dump into a 9×13 baking dish. Evenly pour the granulated sugar, vanilla, salt, and water over the rhubarb. Toss to fully combine. Spoon 2½ tablespoons of Sisters Chai tea into a reusable linen tea bag. If you don't have a tea bag, cheesecloth tied with kitchen twine works well too. Nestle the tea bag into the middle of the roasting pan. This will allow the tea to steep in the water and juices. Roast for about 15 minutes.
- Remove from the oven carefully. Give the teabag a quick stir to disperse the steeped tea around the pan. Add 4 cups of blueberries evenly over the rhubarb. Return to the oven and roast an additional 15-20 minutes until the rhubarb is tender, and the berry juices have released. Remove from the oven.
- Spoon 2 tablespoons of the berry juice into a small bowl and add the cornstarch. Stir until cornstarch forms a slurry. Mix the slurry evenly into the roasted rhubarb and blueberries. Put back in the oven for about 5 minutes to thicken.
- Once done roasting, add 1/2 cup of brown sugar and 1 tablespoon of butter to the fruit. Stir to combine. If your rhubarb is particularly tart, add more sugar to taste. Let it cool to room temperature. Once cooled, let it chill in the fridge before serving. The longer the tea bag sits, the stronger your flavor will be. When ready to serve, remove the tea bag. I like to squeeze the tea bag thoroughly so every bit of spicy flavor is in the sauce.
- Serve over vanilla ice cream, cream biscuits, or angel food cake! Enjoy! This sauce tastes amazing hot or cold. Save and freeze any extras in a quart size container or Ziploc bag. Save for anytime the summer berry mood strikes!
