Celeriac - like a pug, so ugly, it’s cute….I mean delicious!
Inviting people around a table for homegrown and homemade food is at the core of the inspiration for our Happy Boolo Project. And we are guided by our philosophy of community, functionality and sustainability to create a gathering space for the wonderful people in our communities to break bread together. This is the story of a special vegetable in our culinary repertoire and the special person who brought this gift to us.
So maybe it’s a stretch to compare a veggie to a dog type, but in my head whenever I think of the celery root (or more officially celeriac) I think of a pug-nosed dog; they may be objectively ugly looking, but they really are SO adorable. In similar fashion, celeriac is nothing to look at. In one of our foundational vegetable cookbooks, Vegetables by James Petersen, the author describes this root as “convoluted skin and stringy roots sticking out of a dull brown globe…” that looks like “something out of a 1950’s horror movie.” Its softball size and thick exterior of biodegradable armor definitely makes it one of those vegetables that is easier to pass by than to pick up.
But with a few simple tips on purchasing, storing, and wonderful recipes to complement, this could become a new favorite vegetable in your meal-creating repertoire. As Amanda Hesser writes in another of our favorite cookbooks The Cook and the Gardener (Thanks Ryan and Julia McMahon!), “the root is sweet succulent, and substantial, like a potato. It braises, sautes and purees well and can also be eaten raw.” Wonderful flavor and variability of preparation makes it a favorite vegetable in our Happy Boolo kitchen as of the past five years.
Mike cutting a large celery root for one of our favorite stews, Pichlsteiner
Enjoying a Bavarian meal after an afternoon hike — the stew with homemade rye bread and a refreshing Stiegl
In the past couple years, we have also started to grow it in the garden. We make some of our favorite dishes out of it including pichlsteiner, rosol, mash for the holidays, and our absolutely all-time favorite soup for the winter (upcoming recipe post)!
Celery root happily growing in our root garden patch, awaiting harvest in late summer or fall. I regularly dry the leaves or freeze the leaves for later use. Wilder tasting than regular celery, they can be perfect for seasoning a soup and other recipes.
How did we start our love affair with celery root?
We thank our dear friend Basia, who has been a key inspiration for our culinary creations, kitchen approaches, and entertaining philosophy and whom we have known for over fifteen years for our (somewhat recent) fondness for this vegetable. Growing up in Matawy in north-central Poland, she had always appreciated the wonders of fresh vegetables yielded by her family’s garden from a young age. She came to the U.S. in 2004, but still goes back to Poland to see her family frequently, and always tends to her family home and garden when she’s there. With a university degree in health, nutrition, and hospitality, Basia is an expert in curating yummy and healthy eating practices, a background that she shares with us by providing advice and ideas for our own kitchen routines. She’s also the one we trust to look after our garden when we go away for any extended time. And she is an amazing dinner party host.
As we got to know her over the years, she would amaze us with her stories of 20- to 30-person dinner parties executed seamlessly by just her — all the cooking (multiple main dishes and sides), baking (typically multiple cakes and tarts for one evening), and setting a themed table for that many people. Mike and I often wondered how she could be running her business six days a week and still have the energy on top of her awesome talent to pull off multiple dinners and parties over the course of a few months. The entertaining hostess in me longed for more opportunities like this in my own life, but at the time, I was spending a lot of time on airplanes for global business trips and long days in the office with little time for myself. I’ve always been able to handle many moving parts in a work setting so when we would entertain, pulling it all together just made sense to me, and it was handled smoothly. However, I had not yet fully come into my own in the kitchen. Mike was the primary chef up until about eight years ago when I experienced personal challenges that led me to start on a path towards more balance in life (more to come on that in an upcoming post on personal sustainability).
Christmas Eve feast at Basia’s - the perfect hostess standing at the back making sure her guests have what they need before she joins them at the table! I was taking the picture. Unfortunately, Mike was under the weather and missed this amazing evening.
Easy to lose count how many dishes we eat when we are at Basia’s!
As I started my own kitchen journey, I began to intentionally make space for cooking and baking on a regular basis while actually enjoying the process of preparing almost daily from-scratch meals for Mike and myself. As the artist inside me who lovingly designs culinary experiences and curates her table settings for company, and as the explorer who experiments with what we have in the garden was expressing herself more and more, Basia started to take notice. I was ramping up the time spent as a creative culinary person while she was getting busier and busier with her business and spending less time making food with her own hands. One day she said: “I used to do all this cooking and entertaining and you were always busy with work and traveling somewhere. Now you are the one constantly cooking and baking, always coming up with new recipes and meals. It’s like you and I have traded spirits.” :)
Of course, when Basia says she’s too busy, and all she has time to do is throw a few things together, she is still making her feasts. During a late October bonfire at her place, what she called a simple spread turned out to be a generous display of Polish sausages with various condiments, several types of handmade bread from a local Polish bakery, salad, and two cakes for dessert. She also enjoyed showing us the extensive garden she had been tending this year, bestowing upon us a massive amount of “dinosaur” kale to take home. Not sure how she does it all, but hospitality, generosity, and a passion for giving a good time seems to be an ever-renewable energy resource for Basia, and she is always thinking of her next ambitious home-based endeavor.
Thanks to Basia, we have some fun and beautiful photography as part of our Happy Boolo website, as she has impressive photography talents. But what I am most excited about is she is joining us for a series on the celery root (celeriac), which is totally appropriate because she is the one who introduced us to this “pug” veggie in the first place! As this edible root is a primary ingredient in a number of Polish recipes, as well as other Northern and Eastern European cuisines, Basia of course grew up with this root as a regular part of meals at home, whether prepared in cold salad dishes or warm hearty dishes for the winter.
Kicking off our celery root series with Basia
Baked Old Bay salmon on a bed of cilantro lime rice, Morrocan-spiced roasted zucchini, and celery root with wild thyme
Our series will start with an easy way to try celeriac perfect for a holiday meal. For those of you in the U.S., this could be a fun replacement for your Thanksgiving mashed potatoes. I’m certain it would inspire conversation as well as requests for seconds!
Celery root at our local Whole Foods trying to make a space for itself, waiting patiently among the beets and turnips for someone to notice them and take them home for all sorts of yumminess!
Celery roots always have a home and are popular at this Polish market near our home. Thanks to Deli 4 You for always having celery root when the other stores run out!
Key pointers for purchasing, storing, and using celeriac:
Rubbing lemon on peeled celery root for storage
At the store, the celery roots come in a range of sizes. Avoid ones that are larger than grapefruits as they may not be as flavorful. Experts indicate that the best ones are the size of a softball. So if a recipe calls for a large celery root, consider using two smaller ones.
If possible, buy them with the stalks and leaves still on; this can mean they are fresher. I have also used the leaves and stalks in other recipes; they are darker and wilder tasting than traditional celery.
Be sure to select ones that are hard and heavy; if the root is light, that means it’s biodegrading already. Avoid ones that have soft, moist or dark spots, indicating it’s past its prime.
Store in a paper bag in the refrigerator or simply put right in your vegetable drawer with no wrapping. They can be stored for a week to two weeks in the refrigerator. Like other roots and squash, they can be stored longer in sand in a traditional root cellar. While we have used our roots as soon as soon as we have harvested them, we look forward to trying out longer-term storage as we scale-up our celery root production. One tip I’ve read lately: if in a root cellar, keep them somewhat separate from other root vegetables so they don’t pick up the taste of more flavor-pronounced roots such as beets.
Be prepared to use a paring or other knife you are comfortable with using to cut the rough skin off. Celeriac’s exterior can be a bit tough or thick for a typical vegetable peeler.
To ensure the vegetable is very clean, wash it before peeling and after peeling.
If you are removing the skin in advance of using celery root, you can rub lemon juice on the exterior of the flesh to maintain its white flesh. If you cut them ahead of time, you can immerse the pieces in a water-lemon juice mixture. And while these are common tips if you are preparing in advance, I have never found them to get as brown as potatoes after being cut in advance.
Freshly harvested celery root at Zagroda Kozi raj in Marengo - a farm and market where Basia was exploring one weekend
Read on to the next post for our first official celery root recipe which is great for the holiday season - Perfect Holidays Celery Root and Potato Mash!