Celery Sensation

Celery. It seems to be in almost everything. I can’t remember a time without celery in my life, including the classic after-school snack of “ants on a log,” where a small parade of raisins, imbedded in peanut butter, adorned a chunk of celery.

But there’s really not that much to celery. Crunchiness, yes, and fibers to stick in your teeth, and water. Not much flavor, though, to speak of. So why is this considered such an important vegetable?

I remember we tried to grow stem celery for several years in our garden, starting the plants inside, then taking them out to the freshly-turned soil and placing large, dark, plastic rings around them to help them grow vertically and blanch in color. But at harvest time, getting them back out of the ring could be a supreme challenge, and they just never seemed to thrive in our soils.

So, after a while, we gave up on homegrown celery…until we discovered that stem celery wasn’t the only celery kid on the block. Celeriac (or “root celery”) is a bulbous plant that commonly finds its way into CSA shares, but we had heard enough moaning from clients that, in other CSA programs, they’d received celeriac for five weeks straight and it was taking over their refrigerator! Ok, we’ll spare them the root celery.

But as we were looking for creative herbs to grow in our aquaponics greenhouse, we learned about “cutting celery,” which is a perennial rather like parsley. In fact, we have to keep the cutting celery away from the parsley because they look so similar. The crunchy stems are slender and dark green, and the leaves are also dark spreading like parsley, only the lobes on the leaves are more pointy. And, like an herb, you can cut off the outer, larger leaves and stems, and the center will continue to grow. That means a considerable quantity of celery harvest per seed, unlike the classic stem celery.

While it may look rather like Italian flat-leaf parsley, cutting celery certainly doesn’t taste anything like parsley at all. Think celery flavor magnified 50 fold.

Chef Chris Ray of 5-Course Catering was in the shop last week making soups to keep up with all the culinary projects while we struggled through the throws of lambing on little sleep. It’s part of our new partnership to have Chef make prepared foods from-the-farm that folks can pick up at Farmstead to take home and enjoy. The salads, soups, and entrees he’s made are way better (and tastier) than commercially prepared foods as far as health, but also in terms of taste!

Starting his day, Chef had asked for a variety of herbs from the greenhouse—basil, sage, parsley, and plenty of cutting celery. I grabbed a bin and got to work with the scissors, returning it to the kitchen, where it perched on a stool, awaiting use.

A little while later, while I was doing administrative computer work and minding the shop, Chris emerged from the kitchen, totally jazzed.

“The celery, the chopping celery, you have to do a story on it,” her urged, expressing his fervor with his hands and favorite knife.

“I always wondered why it was such a classic soup stock—carrots, celery, onion, when it seemed like the celery never did anything. Now, if I’m a hotel quality chef, and I’d see this celery come in, and there’d just be nothing to it. No smell, no flavor, limp.

“Now, you go out and get that chopping celery, and it’s just sitting there in the bin off to the side, and I can smell it. Then I throw a little water on it and, whoa, out comes that celery smell. Then I put the knife to it, and boy, you better be ready for a real celery kick! This stuff is amazing. Why would anyone want to use regular celery when they could have this!

“I’m just saying, you need to write a story about this celery.”

With that accolade complete, he returned to the kitchen and the kettles of pungent soups of our home-raised turkey, cranberry beans, carrots, and of course the famous cutting celery, which came as the finishing note in our taste tests of the day’s product.

Don’t get too overboard when adding in the cutting celery, though, because it is more pungent than the store variety. A little will go a long way. Use the stems and the leaves in soups and stews or ever chop them up and add them to a summery salad for extra flavor. Once established, it certainly grows like crazy in our aquaponics greenhouse, offering celery for culinary and CSA purposes!

At about ¼ inch wide (a bit on the skinny side for ants on a log), cutting celery takes this mild, crunchy, bland vegetable and turns it into a celery sensation—enough to bring a chef out of the kitchen to proclaim its attributes. So if you, like me, have tired traditional celery for years without much success, consider giving cutting celery a try. Or if you’re not a gardener, stop on over at Farmstead and I’ll run out to the greenhouse and pick some for you. Cheers to celery! See you down on the farm sometime.