Turkish Celeriac Recipe (Zeytinyagli Kereviz)

Turkish Style Celeriac (Zeytinyağlı Kereviz) is braised with carrots and quinces, flavored with lemon and orange juice. A wonderful side dish or a vegetarian meal. Perfect combination of sweet, savory, earthy and citrus flavors. This recipe can make you a celeriac fan even if you are eating it for the first time.

What is Celeriac?

Celeriac is one of the most underrated vegetables we’ve ever come across. It might not be the most beautiful of them all, but it’s certainly one of the most versatile and flavorful ones. 

Celeriac is the root part of your everyday celery plant (those long green stems that are often used in salads, soups and stocks). It is a large, spherical, knobby brown root with an extremely thick skin. Once the skin is removed, you get to the flavorful white fleshy part inside that is used in recipes.

Celeriac vegetable is mostly found in winter and extremely popular in the Mediterranean, North American and Northern European cuisines.

What does It Taste Like?

Celeriac has a unique earthy flavor. The celery flavor element also comes through strongly and gives off a slight spicy and peppery taste. Although the texture of cooked celery root closely resembles that of potatoes or turnips, its taste is way more distinctive. So you either love or hate it.

 The dish we are making today makes a fantastic accompaniment, but many people enjoy it on its own as well!

Preparing Celeriac

A celeriac vegetable does have some extra steps that other vegetables might not have. It has a very thick skin that has to be removed before cooking the white fleshy part. This skin is not edible!

The first and easiest way to remove this skin is to use a very sharp knife and remove the top and bottom of the vegetable. Then slice off thick skin sections until you reach the white root part.

The second, much more labour-intensive method is to simply use a peeler until you reach the inside, however, because the skin is so thick, this method might take a while.

 After peeling that ugly skin, the white part of the celery root loses its color fast and starts to get brownish. To prevent this, immediately chop it into a mixture of lemon juice and water. Keep it there until everything else for the dish is ready. You don’t need to rinse it when you are ready to add it into the pot. Just drain and cook.

Turkish Zeytinyagli Kereviz

This is one of those dishes called ‘olive oil dishes’ in Turkish cuisine. These are the dishes that are vegetarian, cooked with a generous amount of olive oil and served cold or at room temperature as a side dish, mezze or even a meal. If you want more examples of olive oil dishes, go check out our Turkish Green Beans Recipe and Sunchokes Braised In Olive Oil!

This Zeytinyagli Kereviz recipe, as we call in Turkish, doesn’t contain a lot of ingredients, just very flavor-packed ones.

Our hero ingredient, celeriac root, has strong earthy and slightly spicy flavor notes that is well-balanced with the rest of the ingredients. Besides being delicious, celeriac has a ton of health benefits. It contains a ton of antioxidants, strengthens your bones, improves digestion and even general heart health! You can find more on this source. 

The next note-worthy ingredient is quince. A quince fruit has slightly sweet and slightly spicy flavor-notes that matches and balances that of celeriac perfectly! It creates a more complex flavor pallet that is simply put, like nothing you’ve tasted before! Go check out our Poached Quinces Recipe too!

The further addition of citrus (orange and lemon juice) adds to the refreshing elements.

Olive oil is a must have ingredient and cannot be substituted with any other type of oil! It is a staple ingredient in Turkish cuisine and very often even more is added before a vegetable dish like this is served.

Finally, fresh dill complements all the earthy, tangy and sweet flavors. If you are not a fan, you can use parsley instead. 

What Vegetables Go with Celeriac?

Celeriac is a surprisingly versatile vegetable. The best flavor pairings are ones that are either very bland (so the flavor of the celeriac vegetable itself can shine), or you can pair it with extremely strong or intense flavors (so it acts as a supporting ingredient to those flavors).

The best vegetables to pair with celeriac root include basic ones like potatoes, onions, and celery of course. The more intricate pairings would include vegetables like rutabagas, beets, turnips, shallots and carrots. We also love to add either diced celery or celeriac in soups. Check out our Vegetarian Carrot Soup With Lentils as an example.

Although this ingredient is mostly paired with other winter-vegetables, you can definitely consider refreshing pairings such as mint, green apples, blueberries, basil, lemons and roasted nuts too.

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