Almost nobody buys celery for celery's sake. You need two stalks for a soup base, and the rest of the bunch goes in the fridge in its plastic sleeve. A week later it bends instead of snapping, and eventually it goes in the bin.
The annoying part is that the celery isn't the problem. The bag is.
Why the bag it came in kills it
Celery gives off ethylene gas as it sits. Sealed plastic traps that gas around the stalks, and trapped ethylene is what speeds up the softening. So the bag holds moisture in, which is good, but it also holds the gas in, which is bad. That's the trade-off you're stuck with.
Aluminum foil solves both sides at once. It keeps the moisture in so the stalks don't dehydrate, but it's loose enough to let the ethylene escape instead of pooling. That combination is the entire trick.
The foil method (three to four weeks)
- Don't wash it yet. Wash stalks as you use them, not before storing.
- Pull off the leafy tops. They wilt fastest and pull moisture from the stalks.
- Wrap the whole bunch snugly in foil, leaving the ends a little open so gas can get out. Snug, not sealed.
- Put it in the crisper drawer on the high-humidity setting.
Done this way, a bunch of celery stays crisp for around three to four weeks, compared to roughly one to two in the bag.
For celery you've already cut (five to seven days)
Once you've chopped it into sticks, foil won't save it. Cut celery dries out from the exposed ends, so it needs water instead:
- Stand the sticks upright in a container of cool water.
- Put a lid on it and keep it in the fridge.
- Change the water every couple of days.
That buys you about five to seven days of genuinely crunchy sticks, which is a lot better than the four or five days cut celery usually manages loose in a bag.
Limp celery isn't dead celery
This one's worth knowing before you throw a bunch out. If your celery has gone bendy but doesn't smell off and isn't slimy or browning, it's just dehydrated, not spoiled. Cut a bit off the bottom of the stalks and stand them in a glass of cold water for an hour or two. They pull the water back up and firm right back up.
It won't fix celery that's actually gone (soft, slimy, off-smelling, browning). But rubbery-from-neglect is very fixable.
The part underneath
Produce dies in the crisper drawer for boring, fixable reasons, the same way berries mold before you finish the box. Better storage buys you weeks. Actually remembering the bunch is in there is the other half of the problem, and it's usually the half that gets people.