Contents
Apium graveolens. In cold food celery is doing one job and doing it better than anything else: crunch without flavour that competes. That is why it is in every bound salad from chicken salad sandwich to tuna salad sandwich, and why substituting something more assertive changes the dish rather than varying it.
Choosing and preparing
- The pale inner stalks and the leaves are the best part and the part most people throw away. The leaves taste like concentrated celery and belong in the salad, chopped, not in the bin.
- String it if the stalks are thick. Run a peeler down the outer curve, or snap the end and pull. Strings in a bound salad are unpleasant in a way that is hard to place.
- Dice small — 5 mm — for bound salads, so each forkful gets some. Slice on a steep diagonal for grain bowls and mezze, where it is meant to be visible.
Why it works cold
Celery is about 95 % water held in rigid cells, and it stays rigid in a dressed salad far longer than cucumber or lettuce because its cell walls are thicker. It is one of the few raw vegetables that is still crunchy on day three.
Keeping
Two weeks or more if you wrap the whole head tightly in aluminium foil rather than the plastic bag it came in — the foil lets ethylene escape while holding moisture, and limp celery is a water problem, not an age problem.
Limp celery is recoverable. Cut the base off and stand the stalks in a jar of cold water in the fridge for an hour; they take up water and go crisp again.
Notes
- Celery is one of the fourteen allergens requiring declaration in the EU, and it hides in stock cubes, soups and seasoning blends.
- Celery salt and celery seed come from a different cultivar, smallage, and are much stronger than the stalk.
Elsewhere on the site
Used in: chicken salad sandwich · tuna salad sandwich · cold lentil bowl · barley salad · mezze plate
Related: soup · Celeriac · Vegetables