Making Celery Salt, Part 2 - August 23, 2020 @goldenoakfarm

Sunday morning I got the dehydrator unloaded and cleaned up the mess on the trays. With our high humidity and temperatures, I won’t leave food on the trays. It will mold too quickly.

When I went to take the dried slurry off this particular tray, I discovered I had forgotten to flatten the pile and the insides were still wet. So it and another tray with the same problem went back into the dehydrator for another 4 hours while I cleaned and chopped celery.

The dried celery doesn’t pack well, and I got a full ½ gallon jar from the 8 trays. I vacuum sealed it until I can add the salt to it, which is why it needs to be very dry. If I don’t, it will reabsorb the moisture from the air and I won’t be able to mix the salt in.

Then I started on the second 10# box of celery seconds. This box was terrible, extremely buggy, some rotten stuff, very old. I wrote to the farm store I’d gotten it from telling them how disappointed I was.

This photo shows how small I chop the celery, not more than 1” long. It makes it easier on the blender if they are smaller.

There were very few leaves in this and this is all I got out of that 10# box. Same size bowl as yesterday.

This is the waste from the 2 boxes, a 32 gallon tote nearly full. It doesn’t look bad from this distance, but every piece in there is bug ridden or starting to rot. What a disappointment!

This is how full I fill the blender, a reversing Oster. You can just see the 1½” of water in the bottom. I put in a little, and add tiny amounts more until it will spin on high and become slurry.

More dripping trips all the way out to the dehydrators and I had 7 small trays full. I finished cleaning up about 2PM and that was it for the day.

On Monday we have to move the pasture pen. I also must get laundry done, make the celery salt, pickup 40# of tomato seconds for making ketchup on Tuesday, and a whole host of other odd jobs.