Kotas Reviews Celery

Occasionally I get requests for reviews on this blog. Sometimes they are reasonable, involving an easily obtained snack treat. Sometimes they are much more difficult to tackle, given they involve a specific place that is far away and hard to get to. Occasionally, they are reasonable and I just don't get around to it for a long time. Today's review is a long time coming, but the requestor is getting married, so I figured it was time. Today we look at Celery. 

Naked as the day it was picked!

Celery is one of those foods that is always kind of there. Often found as an ingredient in soups, stews and pot roasts, it is most commonly found as a filler vegetable in store produced party trays, because carrots were too expensive that month. The commonly consumed variety is called Pascal celery, though it has nothing to do with programming languages. In ancient times the seeds were used as a pain reliever, and celery juice is thought to lower blood pressure. It is also one of the few vegetables to have ribs that are consumed. I've never been a huge fan of celery, but I used to enjoy seeing how many of the weird tubes I could fully extract from a stalk before consumption. High in fiber too, and while not actually a negative calorie food, it is incredibly low in them. 

The flavor is...mostly just bitter. There isn't a huge amount of unique flavor to celery, which is probably why it finds its way into many recipes as a mitigating agent and for a touch of "green" to an otherwise starch and protein heavy meal. It's got a tremendous amount of crunch in the bite, and will keep you chewing for a long while. But of course, we here at Kotas Reviews can do better...

The Aristocrats!

Where celery really shines is as a delivery vehicle for things you would eat with a spoon, but are too embarrassed to do so in public because of the shame it would bring to your family.. Celery is essentially without flavor for the most part, so it lets whatever topping you slather on it shine through, particularly if the topping is very strongly flavored. It works much better with savory toppings, but peanut butter (or its other nut butter equivalents) is a fine candidate. Some might press raisins into it at that point, but I would not. 

Because of its U-shaped channel rib, sticky things have a convenient area for glopping into, and it is portable! Sturdy enough for dunking into even the gooiest of sauces and dips, celery brings to your mouth many delights...and a few horrors. Let's just say that salsa is not necessarily a good candidate here. My preferred treat is of course, ranch dressing, but ranch dressing makes almost anything non-sweet taste good.

On the FACE Rating System, celery gets a surprising 1 smiley face. I'm not thrilled with it on its own, but it's cheap, reasonably nutritious, and has a lot of culinary uses. It also lets me eat peanut butter and ranch dressing right from the container, and that means its a winner.