Make Your Own Celery Salt

Once you see how easy it is to make celery salt, you'll never want to buy it again. Check out this super simple recipe.

Ingredients

• 1 part celery seed
• 2 parts salt

Preparation

1. Grind the celery seed with a spice grinder, mortar and pestle, or food processor.
2. Combine the celery seed with the salt and mix well.
3. Store your finished celery salt in a jar and use as needed.

Note: If you use a coarse salt, you may want to grind it as well. It's just a matter of personal preference.

Making Celery Salt From Celery Leaves

Celery salt can also be made from dried celery leaves. Just save the leaves whenever you buy a head of celery for a recipe, and dry them to use in your homemade celery salt.

There are several different ways that you can dry them. The easiest (read: laziest) approach is to lay the leaves out on a plate and shuffle them around a couple of times a day until they feel dry and crumbly to the touch. The same thing can be accomplished by dropping the leaves into a brown paper lunch bag and giving the bag a shake a couple times a day until they're dry.

If you're in a hurry, you can also dry celery leaves in a food dehydrator, or in an oven set to the lowest temp, with the door propped open slightly. If you choose this last method, don't venture far from the oven. The celery leaves will dry quickly, and you definitely don't want them to cook, or worse, burn.

Allow your celery leaves to cool if you choose a heat method of drying. Then, grind the celery leaves and mix one part celery leaves to two parts salt to create your celery salt.

Store your finished celery salt in an air-tight container.

Uses for Celery Salt

Once you make your own celery salt and discover how much better it tastes than the store-bought stuff, you may just find yourself looking for more recipes to use it in. If that's the case, try it in cold salads, like coleslaw, egg salad and potato salad. Use it as a meat rub, for hot dogs, or put it to work as a soup seasoning. It's especially good in tomato soup. And you'll also find that it works well as a seasoning for side dishes, like rice and veggies. 

Just remember that you may need to dial down the salt called for in your recipe to account for the extra salt that your celery salt will contribute to the dish.

If you prefer to leave the salt out when you cook, consider adding a shaker of celery salt to your table. With a ratio of one part celery to two parts salt, this means you'll be getting one-third less salt with every shake.

More Seasoning Blends You Can Make Yourself

Don't stop at just celery salt; it's easy to make your own garlic salt and onion salt too!