Yeah, that. Celery’s one of those flavors that stomps around the beach kicking sand in the other ingredients’ faces. That would be problematic even if it tasted good. I have the same issue with pepper–anything more than a bare trace overwhelms the dish so that it’s all I taste, and I hate the taste.
I *looove *Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray. It’s like ginger ale, but…different. Unfortunately, it has gotten hard to find around these parts.
I once gave some to a friend who said it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever tasted. She had thought I was joking when I said it tasted like celery.
Me too. It’s definitely not a mild taste, either.
I use it to defunkify poultry. If I get a chicken or turkey which wasn’t cleaned correctly, or if the giblets were stuffed back into the cavity, I pick up a spoiled/gamy taste that only celery–or a lot of salt–can remedy. It goes right in the cavity, and right out into the trash after cooking.
There are a few foods which it wrecks. I made an omelet with celery which was ghastly.
Are you guys actually saying it tastes like water chestnuts, literally no flavor? I can see thinking it’s mild, if you get the right kind and you aren’t sensitive to that flavor. But if it were flavorless there’d be no point in cooking it in anything. It’s part of what “chicken seasoning” is.
And I concur with people who say it’s unpleasant raw. It has that same weird taste that mustard does.
Celery has a peppery spicy flavor. It’s usually pretty dilute in the stalks, but you can taste it pretty strongly in the seeds.
Celery has an incredibly strong and harsh flavour for me. Anyone who says it’s bland or flavourless, I envy you. But I also cannot even begin to fathom the idea of celery having no flavour. Like stringy water? I really can’t even picture it. The smell of celery alone hurts my nose. If a tuna sandwich in a store has celery in it, I can smell it through the packaging. I want to eat celery because it actually has more nutrients and compounds than you’d think, but I just can’t. The taste is just too strong for me, and the scent too. Not even peanut butter overpowers the nastiness for me. I seriously envy you guys. 
Celery is delicious, and I thank all of you who own up to eating cooked celery. My mother, not the greatest culinary expert, served us cooked celery at least once a week when I was a kid, and I assumed this to be normal.
Later, roommates and friends were appalled at the idea of cooking celery (Eeeewww! Cooked celery! Eeewwww!), so I figured my mother’s cooking it was a Swedish thing inherited from her mother, an immigrant.
So, not to appear more weird than necessary, I became a closet cooked celery eater. Now I can out myself! Ahh, how liberating!
I like celery, raw or cooked. It has a mild but distinctive flavor that I like, and it contributes to the overall flavor of any dish it is added to.
Celery stems are very close to flavorless. They do have a flavor, but it’s very far in the background. The root and seeds, however, do have a bit of kick to them, not wholly unlike radish or black pepper (though not exactly like them, either, of course).
And while cooked celery as a dish by itself just seems odd, it’s an essential component in many soups, stews, stuffing, etc. Cooking them does seem to bring out more flavor than they have raw, though it’s hard to say whether it’s the same flavor.
EDIT:
…And this is what I get for just reading the first page. I forgot that I had posted to this thread a few months ago.
I love celery either raw or cooked, and I am in agreement with the peppery and anise flavoring group. Cooked, it gives soups and the like a subtle flavor layer that is definitely missed if it is not there.
Dipping it in peanut butter is just nasty
I like celery, but then I like crunchy things. Including water chestnuts–I eat those just for the texture because they have no taste. Raw tomatoes both store-bought and home-grown have a nasty texture and must be cooked to death to be edible.
Sounds like a Spinal Tap song.
I think celery can be like other fruits and veggies.
Honestly, I’m willing to bet celery grown on one hill in a town, and one town over on their little hill the celery tastes completely different to the other one. Much like wine made from the grapes of one set of hills can be completely different than one a few hills over. It also might have to do with not only the soil differences, but sunlight amounts at various angles, amount of rainfall/water, what kind of stuff is in the water it does get from whatever source, etc.
Onions can be similar to these as well. Ever gotten a set of vidalia onions and tried to grow your own? They won’t be sweet, and will be the usual spicy onion thing most know.
Tastes delicious to me. How can anyone hate it?
Now if I could find Cel-Ray, I’d be in heaven.
This. And there are only two foods in this world that I utterly cannot abide: celery and anis/licorice. You could put a hundred dollar bill on the table next to a piece of celery or black licorice and say, “eat one of these without gagging and the bill is yours.”
I’d lose.
Yeah, but why dis they discontinue Diet Cel-Ray?