Cutting celery is a type of heirloom celery that is mainly leaves on thin, hollow stems. Unlike the celery you're used to seeing on grocery store shelves, this celery has a strong, peppery celery flavor. The stalks aren't good for putting peanut butter on, but they are great at adding celery flavor to soups, gravies, stews, sauces, potato water, salads and more.
In old world style soup making, my late grandmother would take the leaves from her store bought celery, the onion scraps, and maybe carrol peels and such and toss them in the stock pot with her chicken bones and water, or in her gravy or mashed potato water. After cooking she would discard the veggie peels and celery leaves.
Sometime in the last five years or so I stopped seeing the leaves being sold on the super market celery. Now they chop them off and sell just the stalks. I'm guessing they found a lucratic revenue stream for the leaves or are using them as animal feed or whatever. Similar to how they now only seem to sell broccoli crowns and omit the long stems. (And charge way more than before might I add!)
My desire to keep my potato water and soups tasty led me to finding out about cutting celery, and so I've started growing it this year on the farm. The flavor is fabulous and potent. You can use it chopped up fine like you might parsley or tossed in your cooking water. You can also chop the little stems up for a bit of texture. They're not as hard as store celery, but they do add texture. As a bonus, our celery isn't treated with pesticides and the other crud they spray on the mass market stuff. It seems plenty pest resistent on its own.
Elevate your Thanksgiving dinner with some cutting celery this year!
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