I thought of celery as flavorless for a long time. Then I had Dr. Brown’s Celery Soda, which highlights the peppery flavor notes of celery, and from that point on was able to detect those notes in actual celery. From this thread I’m getting the idea that some celery is more peppery than other celery, though.
Like hell it’s bland. Not as strong as chives, one of the lighter onions. It still has a stronger flavor then bell peppers, carrots, peas, or most vegetables.
If there is a little celery in dish then celery can be the most dominate flavor unless it’s in soup where it’s been boiled to transparency.
I don’t mind the flavor by itself. I’ll eat celery sticks as a snack but I consider it potent stuff in cooking.
Dunno about PROP but you can get PTC test strips (paper that’s been coated with PTC) on amazon for like 5 bucks for a hundred. I have a lot of fun pulling it out at get-togethers and making people try it.
I agree that celery is the beige on the food wheel. We eat it all the time in many different dishes, but I actually have a note on my desk right now to ask my younger son if he might have an aversion to it. The other day we fixed vegetable soup and didn’t have any celery on hand. It was good but I noticed it had a milder taste. Said son isn’t crazy about my soup or my stir fry either, which of course includes lots of celery. Since he likes my cooking otherwise, I finally had an aha! moment while eating the soup.
My older son, OTOH, likes celery so much I have to use extra in stews, etc.
I don’t really mind the flavor of celery, but the texture and eternal chewingess is too much for me.
Raw tomatoes, to me, have a very bland, slightly bitter flavor. They’re not terrible, but I definitely don’t understand anyone eating one like an apple.
If I were blindfolded and had celery put to my tongue, I would not be able to identify it.
I would absolutely identify a bell pepper, though. They have a sickly strong bitter taste, which gets milder when cooked. I can stand them when cooked, but I couldn’t choke down a raw one even if I tried.
Carrots and peas, though, do taste very mild to me. To me, peas are stronger than carrots, but only slightly.
I’m surprised by the widely disparate descriptions of the tastes of celery and am glad that I’m not alone in that it tastes bland.
I like celery, but it has a distinct and fairly strong taste, in my opinion. It’s a mix of bitter, anise, and just general “greenness,” if that makes any sense.
Celery from the farmers market is definitely more flavorful and fragrant than grocery store celery. I like celery raw or in stuffing but cooked chunks of it are a textural turn-off. It’s definitely not something that ruins a whole dish for me, like cooked green peppers or cilantro do.
Me, too.
I must be the real outlier here… celery has a distinct, fairly intense “celery” flavor to me, that’s a tiny bit numbing (nothing like Szechuan peppercorns), and kind of “green” for lack of a better term. But I like it… raw, cooked, etc… all are fine by me. One of my favorite things in chicken soup are the bits of cooked celery.
As for why I don’t like raw tomatoes; I think it’s about half texture- I don’t like the jelly, nor the texture of the “meat”. The other half is more an aversion to some tomatoes; probably 80% are fairly inoffensive, but 20% seem to have this… musky(?), almost bitter taste that I just hate. Generally speaking, I can do raw tomato based salsa without a problem but things like pico-de-gallo and a slice of tomato on a hamburger are a crapshoot as to whether it’ll be overwhelmingly funky or not.
Now if you want weird… go try cardoons. Physically, they most resemble large, tough, stringy celery, but the flavor is very similar to artichokes.
I like celery raw, or cooked in any number of foods. It has a distinct taste - I wouldn’t call it bland, but it’s not overpowering either. It compliments a lot of other things from other vegetables, dressings or meats. I like chopping it into tuna fish salad for a little crunch.
It’s hard for me to imagine why anyone would have such a negative reaction to it, but then again some people can’t understand why sweet potatoes make me gag.
The numbing description is interesting. I never noticed that, myself. But with Sichuan peppercorns is pretty obvious (so much so that I thought I was having some weird allergic reaction the first time I bought some and tried them on their own. I had no previous notion that they were supposed to be that way.)
Raw celery is gross. It’s bitter and has a nasty aftertaste that lingers on my palate. OTOH, cooked celery and celery salt are necessary items in one’s culinary arsenal.
While we’re here, though, is there anything fouler than raw celery with peanut butter? Whoever thought that one up should have been tried for crimes against humanity.
I love celery! Raw or cooked.
I think it has a very pungent smell. When I chop it, my hands definitely smell of it.
Oddly enough I am very averse to bitter and spicy, and I detect neither of these things in celery. I also am one of those people for whom cilantro tastes of soap.
Bah, quote isnt working for me again so screw it.
Celery - there are several types of celery that are grown, and in addition there is a terroir similar to that of peppers where heat and dryness can intensify inherent flavors.
As others have mentioned, celery can be watery-bland [a friend remarked it was like water chestnuts] to anise like, to delicate and almost hrebal-citrusy. Someone else also mentioned that szechuan pepper tingle.
Ignoring celeriac or root celery, we have pascal celery as the most common cultivar which is the more bland or sweeter celery, and smallage or wild celery or english celery. About the best way I can describe the difference is the lighter color more fleshy stalks are the pascal celery and will tend to be milder. If you see stalks that are more stringy looking, and a darker color and just not as fleshy, those will tend towards the more strongly flavored bitter end - that kind isn’t really good for eating raw just cooking with.
As I said above, there is also a terroir where a intense dry hot growing season will produce a pascal celery with that bitter tingle, so I tend to sneak a leaf to taste test the bunch. If I am looking for celery to munch raw, I don’t want that bitterness.
Yes. I can smell that terrible odor of celery from across a room. Bad stuff.
People are all over the place in their ability to detect certain flavors. There is no such thing as normal.
I am a double-super taster. So bitter stuff, for example, hits me hard.
I like mild celery. I eat it almost everyday. If it was as bitter like cilantro or broccoli, no way.
What makes some celery mild? Lack of exposure to the Sun. In olden times, farmers would “blanch” their celery near harvest time. They’d put up boards on stakes along the row to protect the stalks from the Sun. This would make the stalks paler, sweeter and less stringy.
But that costs money so it isn’t done much anymore except home growers.
On the flip side, you have consumer ignorance: People think the darker the veggie the better. So light green celery is passed up in favor or darker, bitter, stringier, celery. (OTOH, you don’t want completely white celery. Limp and flavorless.)
Another factor seems to be how and with what it’s cooked. Celery to me is one of those veggies that shouldn’t be cooked. A complete waste of a tasty food. Put celery in a soup and it seems to magically absorb some awfulness from the broth that warrants rejection.
To me, celery has a strong flavor and even stronger fragrance, both of which I find disagreeable, but difficult to describe. Bitter, astringent, with metallic notes is about the best I can do. It’s not nearly as unpleasant when cooked into something, probably because cooking drives off a lot of the aromatics.
Celery to me has a strong fragrance, and a medium to mild flavor of sweet, anise-y… celery-yness. It makes my mouth numb.
Very distinctive flavor, which I like a lot.
I just did a taste test of celery, alone or dipped in peanut butter. I found that the celery had a very mild taste by itself, yet I could still taste it alongside the peanut butter. But about 15-20 minutes after eating, I had a bitter taste in my mouth, stronger than the actual celery taste had been.