Dehydrating Celery

hi welcome to rosebud homestead today is another video in our series of dehydrating food this time we're going to do celery and at the end of the video I'm going to show you how to use to hydrated celery to make your own celery salt and boy is it yummy so we will get started in just a moment when we come right back I have started on the process and I would like to just take you through it verbally we're starting with celery that just comes from the grocery store and I always like to purchase celery that has a lot of leaves because as you can see I've saved the leaves I have already two of these already almost chopped and in here ready for blanching in just a moment but I love the extra strong taste that is in celery leaves and so I do separate celery leaves dehydrating so that I can then use it in celery salt so basically what I do to get ready for celery is I will take every one of these ribs off of the stock and I put them in the sink of hot water warm water and then I will take a vegetable brush like this one and I will just scrub inside and out all the way up and down to make sure that these are really really clean and then I once that I have them in that condition then I just cut off the tops in the bottom now I save all of the scraps here because I will freeze this and add it to some other vegetable savings and ultimately I'm going to be making a vegetable stock up with this and I will do that in another video sometime later but right now this is the last of those two stalks of celery and here I have my stack of leaves and in this pan notice that this is a colander I have all of the rest of it and I'm just going to add this to it right now and so when I get everything all clean and the tops and bottoms chopped off then I just will go through and chop it about like this being very careful not to cut my fingers I'm notorious for cutting my fingers I've done it many times over the years so I'm trying to be very careful don't want any blood on the show and then I'm just going to move these right into this pot I'm not going to put the leaves in this batch to blanch because I've look I'm going to be treating them separately and I'll bring you back in just a moment but now Jim is going to meet us over at the pot where I have the water already boiling so that we can see how to blanch so we'll go ahead and do that right now well Jim is showing the inside of the pot and now he's going to show the boiling water in the companion pot and I'm going to now lower this right into this boiling water very slowly and once the water returns to a boil then I am going to time it for three minutes that is the recommendation of the National Center for home food preservation we don't start the timing notice that the celery is getting a little bit more green that's one of the things that blanching does is that it really preserves a nice color this should come right back to a boil that's why you don't want to do too much at one time so that it will return to a boil very quickly all right I think it's almost good enough all right I'm going to put the lid on this now and we'll time it for three minutes and then we'll be back all right this is boiled for three minutes it is not cooked it's just blanched and I'm going to move this right over here to this sink of cold water plunge it into the cold water and let the cold water run through it all right this is cooled down and I'm going to drain it and I'm going to move it over here and put it out on the towel Oh a lot stayed in here let me just reach it with my hand and get it out of here all right it's a rich pretty green much darker than if I were to have just not blanched it now the next thing I'm going to do let this cool for just a minute and I have run the knife through these leaves and I'm now going to put this into the bucket and I'm going to blanch these for about one minute and while those get started I'm going to come back over here and start putting this celery and it's still warm which is good that means that it will just be easier to get the moisture out with the heat already in there and I pile it on some people put pieces individually on their shelves I don't I just slip it on here and then I'll put these over in the dehydrator I hear the celery over on the burner the leaves here we have to a rolling boil oh yeah all right that's enough for those and I'm going to now put these in the boiling in the cold water in the sink and those have cooled so this blanching is a very quick process about one tray per stalk of celery and each one had eight to ten ribs good-sized ribs except this one over here and then I'm going to let this drain on the towel for just a minute and put this on the tree now you'll notice that I'm not putting the celery on the bear tray I have the liner on it that prevents smaller pieces from following falling through so I'm spreading this out there are some larger pieces there and that's okay try to thin these down as much as possible these will most likely be done much quicker than the diced celery okay okay all right I'm going to turn it on and I'm going to set the temperature now right now it says 158 that is too hot so I'm going to decrease the temperature oh that's the time now down and needs to be about 125 135 131 is going to be just fine now I'm going to put the celery leaves in the middle and I'm going to grab these other three trays out because I'm going to fill them with my remaining celery that I haven't processed yet now I'm going to set the timer it says seven hours I'm going to put this up to 18 19 hours it won't go nearly that far but I like to put it way beyond so it doesn't turn off on its own before things are done so I'll be checking this and probably this won't be done until in the morning we'll see how it goes so I have these two stalks of celery yet to do and with this these two stalks plus the leaves that will completely fail my dehydrator and so I'm going to do all of this off-camera and then we will come back in the morning when everything is all dehydrated and I will show you how I put it in bottles and vacuum seal it and then we will make some homemade celery salt so I will see you in the morning when our celery is all dried good morning our celery dehydrated all night long it took about fifteen hours for the last of it to be finished these are the celery leaves and oh my goodness don't they look beautiful they're just the darkest loveliest green and they're crisp as a potato chip and that's just exactly how we want them so I'm going to be loading them in the jars here in just a moment and then we're going to make some celery salt some homemade sale result but I did want to show you the difference if you remember yesterday our trays were just piled thickly with this celery and now look it is to hydrate it down to just practically nothing and my guess is that everything here these five trays are going to fit just fine in a pint jar so very quickly we're going to do that and I just fold up this inner liner and I hope that you can hear how crunchy it sounds as these little pieces of celery are going into the jar [Music] and so this will just take us a quick minute I'm just always amazed at how little is left after a dehydrating process like this and this was four giant stalks of celery and our last one this jar is full and I'm going to leave a little bit out right here for our celery salt this actually looks like about the right amount now for the celery leaves I'm going to do the same thing [Music] these will pack much looser in here so I am going to mash them down just a little bit and I'm going to leave a little for the sell result right here so I have two jars this one is celery leaves and this one is just a regular diced celery and these will be just really great when I'm making dried packages of soup to go in the meals and bags that I often do and and actually just to add to any soup or stew or the thing about dehydrated celery is that when it reconstitutes you cannot use it as a substitute for fresh celery for instance I would never use to hydrated celery in my potato salad I do need fresh celery for that but to add it to anything like soups or stews this is just a great thing to have on hand and it's so convenient sometimes when I want to make something I don't have fresh celery and so I am able to use this in most things which is really good and then for the celery leaves as I've mentioned it actually a couple of videos I really do like the taste of celery leaves it it adds such a concentrated flavor of the celery and because we blanched the celery it did not take us long to dehydrate and it will quickly rehydrate in soups and stews which is one of the main reasons why we want to blanch and also it just preserves this beautiful beautiful color alright now that I have these loaded I have my Vitamix blender right here and this is what we're going to use to make the celery salt now celery salt is such a wonderful commodity to have on hand sell result brings such a fresh flavor to so many things not only does it add the salt flavor but that fresh celery is so wonderful on potato dishes mashed potatoes in salads in soups and in like deviled eggs on the top of deviled eggs it is just there are a myriad of uses for sell result and making your own is just a lot of fun and so here are the ingredients for sale result you use about equal amounts of sell results and celery seed now this is some celery seed that a friend gave to me it is it is whole celery seed and it is packed by Good Earth is the name of the company and it is probably the best celery seed I've ever had so I have a tablespoon of celery seed and let's see I'm gonna start over on the recipe I want to make sure that I'm getting it exactly right you use about the same amount of salt as you do the dehydrated celery so I have about three tablespoons of salt and this is just this sea salt fine sea salt and then I'm going to put about the same amount of this celery in fact I might get a little bit more and I am just sort of eyeballing it with the celery salt the great thing about making your own is that you can balance the taste as you like so I am going to very quickly add these ingredients to the Vitamix and so it is about I'm looking at my little recipe here it is about a tablespoon of celery seed and I have three tablespoons of regular sea salt I'm going to put about three tablespoons of the dehydrated celery I'm gonna add just a little bit more because I love that celery taste and then about one tablespoon of the celery leaves and this looks like more than a tablespoon but it is so airy that if I were to crush this down this would be about a tablespoon now I'm going to get my Vitamix going here because I want the ingredients to hit that blade and pulverize and I'm making a powder the first two ingredients that I'm going to add are is the celery seed and then the dehydrated celery and I want to do that all at one time while the blades are going so that it will pulverize so I'm going to turn it on I'm going to turn it on quite high so it will really hammer eyes it comes with celery seed that's making a lovely powder I hope you can see that and now I'm going to add the sea salt and now I'm going to turn it down when I add the celery beads and I'm just going to pulverize post it all right let's see what we have I'm going to put it in this little dish so that you can see it and so here it is it is beautiful I'm just going to take a quick taste very salty but it has that lovely celery taste to it I am going to add just for taste a few more of these celery leaves and again I'm just doing this by taste I want just a little bit more of that lovely celery taste so I'm going to turn it on I'm going to pulse it again [Music] couple of big ones out okay just a few that didn't quite get powdered and I'm going to put it in this jar so we have about a half a cup of fresh beautiful celery salt and I'm just going to stir it up a little bit mix those ingredients just a little bit better and it is just beautiful now I'm going to set these things aside [Music] and I want to show you how I seal these up so I'm going to move my Vitamix over to the side and bring over my trusty vacuum sealer plug it in now the beauty about putting dehydrated things in jars is that because these are going to last a really long time and I want to preserve the freshness I am going to put them in these jars and then I'm going to vacuum seal them because any time I need to get into these and open them up and use them I can break the seal and then when I'm done I can Reeve a q mitt and so that makes it really really nice and so I'm quickly going to do that well stop there so I'm fitting my sealer over the wide mouth jar plugging in the vacuum hose and we'll start and there we have it sealed and vacuum packed celery celery leaves and I'll put the ring on and then we'll do this one [Music] [Applause] and Dunham can you believe that this is for great big stalks of celery reduced down to one pint of dices and a very loosely packed jar of leaves and these will be such a great addition to our shelves here and we'll have enough Oh probably for several months and then I'll be doing some more celery I'd like to do it and not keep it way too long so that the flavor does not dissipate so that is all there is to dehydrate accelerate and I hope that you've enjoyed this and we'll be back very shortly with another dehydrating video thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 31,875

Rating: 4.9662042 out of 5

Keywords: celery, dehydrating celery, dehydrating celery leaves, home made celery salt, making celery salt, storing dehydrated celery l

Id: l4vCFgKYti8

Length: 24min 49sec (1489 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019