Recipe Review

Homemade Celery Salt from 101 Cookbooks

Dana Velden
Dana Velden
Dana Velden's first book, Finding Yourself in the Kitchen: Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes from a Mindful Cook (Rodale Books) is available where ever books are sold. She lives in Oakland, CA.
updated Mar 24, 2023
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(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

I love celery salt. I think it’s a great addition to just about any savory dish, but I especially like it on my eggs. So when I saw that Heidi Swanson posted a recipe for it on her 101 Cookbooks website, I knew I had to give it a try. Read on for my review.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

This is a simple recipe, with just two ingredients: flaky sea salt and celery leaves. And like any recipe with just two ingredients, you have to be sure that those ingredients are top notch. So I used Maldon sea salt and pulled the leaves from a few stalks of organic celery.

A note on celery leaves. Unfortunately they are getting harder to find, as Heidi notes in her introduction to this recipe. And that’s a shame because there’s a lot of flavor in celery leaves, much more than what’s in the stalks. So look for stalks with leaves when you buy your celery and ask your produce people to leave them on.

The 101 Cookbooks recipe says to either bake or lightly toast the celery leaves in a frying pan. I have west-facing windows, so I thought I’d try sun-drying them over a period of a few days. I thought this was working until I noticed that the cool, foggy evenings we get in Berkeley were rehydrating them. So I threw the partially dried out leaves into a toaster oven for a few minutes and they came out crisp and easy to crumble.

From there it was only a matter of adding an equal measure of the Maldon salt and, using my fingers, pinching it a bit to mix it all up. Just scoop it into a airtight jar and voila! Celery salt!

I find this celery salt far superior to the store-bought kind. The celery flavor really comes through with clean, green, grassy notes. It is absolutely worth the effort. This salt would be fun to make with children and would make an excellent host gift.

There are many uses for celery salt: to rim a glass for a Bloody Mary, sprinkled on top of all manner of eggs, soups and salads or on an open-faced tomato sandwich. It’s also great to use when you haven’t used the celery called for in a recipe. Give it a try!

• Get the recipe: Homemade Celery Salt from 101 Cookbooks

Related:

Make this: Gomashio, Japanese Sesame Salt

(Images: Dana Velden)

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