Celery Salt

Making your own - thanks to 101 Cookbooks

prior to baking

I have never even thought of doing something like this before, but as I was making chicken salad recently, I remembered reading this post from 101 Cookbooks and thought, let's see what happens. I used the leaves from one bunch of celery, I rarely use the leaves anyway, and placed them on a single layer of a baking sheet and baked them at 350 degrees as suggested by 101 Cookbooks and at the suggested time of five to seven minutes. That wasn't long enough for some leaves, so I took off the ones that were dehydrated, tossing a couple that had gone brown. I put the less dehydrated leaves back in the over for another five minutes and let them cool. I thought for sure they would be dehydrated, but I didn't want them to go to brown because that would ruin the whole thing.

leaves & salt mixed

But... they still weren't dehydrated.
So what to do - I took the leaves that were still too soft to crumble and put them in the microwave for 10 seconds at a time on high until they were. I think next time I'll do all of it this way and see how that works. So I'm all ready with the celery leaves and then I realize
- I don't have the type of salt recommended. Here's what 101 Cookbooks says "I've made celery salt with a number of different types of salt, and the flaky, whispers of Maldon sea salt is my current favorite. The shards are similar in size to the crumbled celery leaves which works nicely." That made good sense to me but only had a small sample of Maldon, not nearly enough to mix with my celery leaves.

ready to use

So to the interWeb I go and find a great salt resource, SaltWorks out of Woodinville Washington. Lovely company with a great number of salts and free shipping. And the best price for Maldon I could find. So I waited and in due time, it arrived and I finished my celery salt. I'm pleased with it and plan to use it to rim a glass for Bloody Marys over the weekend.* Yum.

*It's pretty bad when you're planning your weekend drinking on a Monday. Sigh.