I have a couple of recipes that require chopped celery. Only problem is they don’t require much, which leaves me with several stalks that inevitably go bad. The bunnies and birds love the foliage at the top and I do like a nice crunchy stalk myself, but usually there’s more on the bunch than we can use. Can it be frozen and used in cooking or is it one of those veggies that doesn’t freeze well?
I don’t know about freezing it, but leftover celery makes for an excellent and super-easy creme soup.
Freezes just fine. Doesn’t thaw that well though.
ROFL
If you’re wanting to save it for use in soups or stews (like say for a mirepoix or your Cajun "holy trinity)), frozen celery works just fine.
Frozen raw celery will have a texture change. Probably if you panfried it in a little oil, you could freeze and thaw it with good results. Probably.
If I have leftover celery, I just smear it with cream cheese and set it in front of my husband. Problem solved.
Anything with a lot of water content is going to have a hard time after being frozen. The water turns into little ice crystals, as well as expanding in size, and so a lot of the cells burst, cell walls get damaged, so when it thaws, it’s mushy, the water leaks out so it becomes dry, etc…
The best way to freeze things with a lot of water is to freeze them fast. The faster they get frozen, the smaller the ice crystals become, and less likely to puncture the cells. So I recommend quick baths in liquid nitrogen. 
Do a fine dice of carrot, celery & onion, sautee in butter with a generous amount of salt until the pan is dry, then freeze in flat sheets in ziplock bags. The combination of cooking, driving out most of the moisture and freezing fast means there will be minimal textural damage. This is the first step to many classical French/Italian recipes and can be a massive time saver.
Notice you never see frozen celery in the supermarket. There’s a reason for that.
I do freeze excess celery, but as everyone else says here, not for eating later. I use it to make stock (chicken or veggie) later, when I have a pile of things of that nature.
I freeze extra celery (which is rare at my household, but it happens). It retains the celery taste but not the crispness when thawed. Frozen celery goes in soups and stews in this house.
I’ve heard that wrapping celery in aluminum foil and storing it in the fridge gives it amazing longevity. According to one of my cookbooks, it’ll keep for weeks. Sadly, I’m just in the middle of my first experiment to see if it really works or not.
Earlier just this week, I wanted to use some celery in a recipe when I noticed that one of my bunches had gone bad. The other one was still usable, though, so I used what I needed, wrapped the rest in foil, and stashed it back in the fridge. We’ll see how well the tinfoil test goes.
No recipe “requires” chopped celery but for Celery Soup or Celery and Peanut Butter. I mean it’s flavorless water and strings for crying out loud. Skip it next time and see if you notice a difference.
I’ve certainly seen frozen celery at the supermarket–not plain, necessarily (I’d have to check), but definitely in vegetable mixes. Like I said, celery freezes absolutely fine if all you’re doing is using it for soups or stews.
The tinfoil thing definitely works.
Besides the fact that fresh celery is pretty cheap and plentiful year round?