Economist Writing Every Day

For maybe three purchases of celery, bought in 2023 from different stores, the fibers or strings in them were so tough that we could not chew them to point of chopping them into small enough pieces to comfortably swallow. We would chew away for several minutes, masticating and swallowing most of what we bit off from the stalk, but this left a tangle of intact strings in our mouths, to be spit out. Prior to 2023, we never recall having a batch of celery that was simply inedible like this. For at least one batch we were so disgusted that we just threw it out.

I tried steaming a couple of stalks for a minute or so in microwave. This turned most of the celery into unappealing mush, whilst doing the stalks no apparent harm.

For the most recent bunch of unchewable celery, I finally got wise and harnessed the vast power of the internet to solve this problem. I did not have to invoke ChatGPT, so I was perhaps spared an AI hallucination regarding string theory. A simple DuckDuckGo search (this search engine respects your privacy, unlike You Know Who) found there are at least three reasonable ways to strip the offending strings out of a celery stalk. This article from Kitchen Ambitions does a great job describing these three ways:

( 1 ) Carefully snap the stalks in half the correct way (it is obvious when you think about it; or see the article), leaving the two halves connected by the strings. Then you can peel the strings down the lengths of the stalks. This is the easiest and cleanest way. I found I usually had to do a second round of snapping and peeling to get the rest of the strings.

Or

( 2 ) At one end of the stalk, use sharp knife to tease up the ends of several strings at a time, and peel them down the length of the stalk.

Or

( 3 ) A brute force approach is to use a vegetable/carrot peeler. This does work, but removes more of good celery along with the strings.

Hurray for economical life hacks – – the internet knows everything.