More on celery! When you’re processing celery, it’s a great idea to save those celery leaves. Though they taste absolutely horrible, they are a valuable thing to have for additional preservations.
If you’ve ever chewed down celery leaves, we definitely wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to toss them into the compost pile! Compared to celery, they are not good! They’re super bitter and lack any sweetness, likely to force you to make a face when eating them. But, it’s exactly that “offensive” flavor that further processing can help with!
We find celery leaves incredibly valuable in stock making. Be it vegetable or meat stocks, celery is always a major ingredient in those stocks. Using celery leaves as the basis for that huge amount of celery keeps you from dipping too far into your valuable celery stash!
We don’t bother with any kind of blanching or other longer term preservation here, just toss the leaves into the freezer. The reason is, stock is usually a fall or early winter task for us and so we’ll be using them up shortly. Plus, the textures just don’t matter in stock anyway, since you’ll be filtering out all those veggies.
The long cooking times involved with stock making are definitely going to extract those flavors, but it will also severely mellow out all that bitterness from the celery leaves. What you’re left with is a very robust flavored stock, well influenced by the celery from your garden. Just without using your valuable celery!
We don’t usually follow any “official” directions when considering amounts to use in our stock. The answer, for us, is usually “all or a lot of it” anyway. We will split these bags among veggie and meat stocks, of course, usually one bag per major stock batch. Most years, we’ll make veggie, chicken and turkey stocks. Sometimes beef if we get a few “on the bone” cuts.
We are pretty serious about making our celery harvest last the entire year! This is one of the ways we help with that. You may have noticed that we don’t often use a lot of our garden byproducts (e.g. beet leaves, radish leaves, etc), but this is one major exception. Usually those things are more valuable to us as compost, but not in this case.
Just talking about making stock has us slightly looking forward to the colder months! Though we’re truly enjoying the last moments before we go into the “ice box” for the next six months, the summer months take their toll on us. We’re definitely getting tired of the “go, go, go” and are ready to sit down for a minute.
