Can You Freeze Celery?

What happens when you freeze celery

Celery is water held in place by rigid fibers, and freezing bursts the first while leaving the second behind. What thaws is limp, stringy, and slightly hollow-tasting: useless raw, perfectly good cooked. In soup, stock, stuffing, braises, and the bottom of a mirepoix, nobody has ever noticed. Keep the leaves too — they carry more celery flavor than the ribs do, and they freeze just as well.

How to freeze it right

1. Wash and dry the ribs, then slice them the way your soup pot wants them.
2. Blanch briefly if it’s going in for the long haul; it keeps the color and flavor from fading.
3. Freeze the slices loose on a tray so they pour instead of clumping.
4. Bag them with the air pressed out, leaves in a bag of their own.
5. Date the bags.

Thawing and using it

Tip it in frozen. Celery goes from the bag into stock, soup, chili, and braises and softens almost at once. If a recipe sweats it in butter first, do that from frozen too — just let the extra water cook off before anything else joins the pan.

Can you refreeze it?

Fridge-thawed celery can be refrozen safely, but it turns to string by round two — freeze it in soup-size handfuls so you never thaw more than one pot’s worth.