How to DEHYDRATE Celery | Homemade CELERY SALT | Freezing Celery Tops

Right now I'm harvesting the majority of my celery. It's ready to go and it's really hot here which celery doesn't like. So I'm gonna try and get this harvested and preserved and what I'm planning on doing with this is dehydrating it and I've never done that before so this is the first time for me. But in general things that are dehydrated do really well in soups so that's what I'm planning on using this for is soups and I know that I will make vegetable broth. I'm gonna can some of that this year so it will be for that. So as I get ready to dehydrate the celery I'm rinsing it first. There's a lot of little surprises that you find inside celery and then the book that I'm looking at it's called The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook and it is a favorite of mine. I like to use it just because sometimes you're not sure whether or not you need to blanch a vegetable before you dehydrate and this has all the instructions for that. So according to this book the best result is to blanch before dehydration. So I'm blanching for just one minute and then I put it in the ice water bath. I usually scoop it into there because I'm reusing the water. I'm doing several batches but if you just want to do one batch then you can just pour it straight into a colander and then put it into the ice water bath. So the next thing that I do is I take it and I spread it out on the dehydrator trays. You want to form like a nice even layer when you do this and it only filled up about six trays worth and that actually works out really well because I wanted to dehydrate some of the celery leaves as well. So I'm just loading these up and then I'm going to get ready to do the celery leaves before I start the dehydrator. So I was trying to figure out what I want to do with the celery leaves and I'm going to do two things with them. So I'm going to blanch and freeze some of the celery tops for using in making vegetable broth and chicken broth and all those things that I can. The rest of the celery leaves what I can fit on the trays I am going to try and make some of my own celery salt. So to freeze the leaves I did decide to blanch them first and it was a really fast blanch probably 15 seconds and then I pull it out and put it in the ice water bath to stop the celery from cooking and then just drained it and put it in a bag and then after it's all packaged I just go ahead and put it straight in the freezer. With the remaining celery leaves I am chopping them and putting them straight onto dehydrator trays. No blanching necessary here because it is going to be powdered into the celery salt. I packed that tray pretty tight. You're really supposed to do it a little bit like more spread out so that everything dries evenly but I just don't care at this point. 125. So after 12 hours I removed the trays from the dehydrator and it always shocks me how small the the vegetable is whatever it is and the celery is no exception. It's so tiny but that's one of the benefits of dehydration is if you don't have a lot of room you can still store a lot of food once the water is out. So my preferred method for storage just because we eat it so fast is I just go ahead and store it in the jars. Just easy for me to open and close and use as much as I like. If you were to store this for longer you could use mylar bags or you could stick an oxygen absorber into the jars. We usually eat ours within a year so I have never had a problem with it going bad or rehydrating and I just go ahead and leave it in the jar and I don't even use the the extra step of the oxygen absorber. So this is the celery leaves. I'm just putting each tray of leaves into my blender and kind of have to press it down to get it all to fit in there. So once you have it all powdered you add the salt and so on my blender I have a measuring line on there and I could see I had about three quarters of a cup of the celery powder so I added a three quarters of a cup of salt. So if you had like one cup of celery powder you would add one cup of salt. So I just did half half celery powder and half salt. Then I just go ahead and add it to a jar for storage and this made a lot of celery salt so I think I'll be set for a little while. you