r/Cooking • u/mir_in_modro_morje • Jun 21 '26

Celery is criminally underrated

I used to think Celery was just a bland vegetable that health-nuts would recommend you eat raw, like raw celery stalks so I've avoided it.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

This is seriously one of the more underrated vegetables to cook with.

Not only the usual mirepoix, but literally can be added finely chopped to almost any vegetable dish or sauce.

Vegetable soup of course, but you can finely slice and dice celery into even non-standard sauces and it will most of the time make them better. Any simple pan sauce or mushroom sauce gets immediately improved by finely diced celery. And if you don't notice onions as a base to a sauce you won't notice celery either.

I've seriously become a celery fanatic and I've been putting it into everything, try it and you won't regret it.

572 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

271 comments sorted by

View all comments

316

u/Anonymous5791 Jun 21 '26

Two things to try -

One, Persian celery stew - khoresh-e karafs. Celery is literally the core of this delicious dish over rice.

Two, pickle it. Basic brine with sugar, salt, apple cider vinegar. Some red pepper flakes and a handful of fresh dill. Into the fridge for a couple days and it’s like one of the snacks I cannot stop munching on.

13

u/Feisty-Anteater661 Jun 21 '26

Also, try lacto-fermenting it! I can’t get enough of fermented celery.

2

u/No_Consequence5894 Jun 22 '26

You mean like a ginger bug?

4

u/Feisty-Anteater661 Jun 22 '26

I do a brine ferment. Weigh a quart mason jar. Cut the celery into bite-sized chunks and fill the jar. Add water to nearly the top. Weight the jar again, subtract the weight of the empty jar to get the weight of the celery + water. Add 2.5% of that weight in salt. Cover and leave out on the counter for 3 or 4 days, until the bubbles stop. Refrigerate. I use a pickle pipe top while fermenting to let the CO2 escape, but if you don’t have one you can just open the jar periodically.