Washing and drying greens so nothing goes soggy
Okay. Last piece of the salad puzzle. We did the jar dressing, we did the ratio, and none of that matters if your lettuce is sitting in a puddle of its own water when the dressing hits it. Wet greens are the number one reason people think they don't like salad. It's not the vegetable. It's that nobody taught them to dry the thing properly.
So this lesson is short and it's basically all technique, no ingredients to buy.
Why wet greens ruin everything
Dressing is oil and vinegar. Water doesn't want anything to do with either one. So if there's water clinging to your lettuce, the dressing just slides off and pools at the bottom of the bowl instead of sticking to the leaf. You end up with a naked salad on top and a swimming pool of vinaigrette underneath. Nobody wins.
Dry greens are the whole trick. That's it. That's the lesson, really, everything else is just how you get there.
Washing
Even bagged "pre-washed" greens, I still give a rinse if I've got time, but the real issue is usually a head of romaine or leaf lettuce you bought whole.
- Pull the leaves apart. Don't try to wash a whole head at once, it doesn't work.
- Fill a big bowl or your sink basin with cold water. Dunk the leaves and swish them around with your hands. Let them sit a second — the dirt and grit sink to the bottom, the lettuce floats.
- Lift the leaves out of the water with your hands rather than dumping the whole bowl through a strainer. If you dump it, all that grit you just separated goes right back over the lettuce on its way out.
- If the water at the bottom looks sandy, dump it, refill, do it again. Sometimes takes two rounds, especially with stuff straight off a farm stand.
That part people generally get right. It's step two, the drying, where everybody just wings it and loses.
Drying — the part everyone skips
A salad spinner is the one gadget in this whole course I'll actually tell you to go buy. I'm suspicious of gadgets in general, I think half of them end up at the DI within a year, but a salad spinner earns its cupboard space. It's cheap, it lasts forever, and it solves a real problem instead of a pretend one.
If you don't have one yet: a clean kitchen towel works. Lay the leaves out on it, roll it up loose like a burrito, and just squeeze and pat. It's slower and you'll bruise delicate stuff like spinach if you're rough about it, but it works.
With a spinner:
- Load the basket loosely. Don't cram it, the water needs somewhere to go.
- Spin in short bursts rather than one long grind. Dump the water out of the outer bowl between bursts, because otherwise the greens are just spinning back into the water they threw off.
- When it looks dry, run your hand along a leaf. If it still feels damp, spin again. Trust your hand, not your eyes, your eyes will lie to you here.
Do this a few hours ahead if you want. Dried greens actually keep better in the fridge, loose in a bowl with a paper towel over the top. The paper towel catches any last bit of moisture. This is one of those rare cases where doing it early makes it better, not worse.
The Oakley thing, again
I've told you Oakley wouldn't touch salad for about a year, called it grass, very serious about the boycott. The dressing jar is what cracked that open, letting a kid shake their own oil and vinegar. But it turns out the washing and spinning did just as much work. Oakley loved cranking that spinner. Loved it. Would ask to do the lettuce even on nights we weren't having salad, which, sure, I'll take it.
Point being, if you've got a kid in the house who's on strike against vegetables, hand them the spinner. It's not a trick exactly, it's just that a kid who spun the lettuce feels like they made the salad, same as the kid who shook the jar. And a kid who made it is a kid who'll eat it. I've never seen that fail.
A note on timing
Dress the salad right before you eat it, not thirty minutes early. Even perfectly dry greens will go limp if they're sitting in vinaigrette while you finish the pasta. Toss it right at the table, or right before you sit down. This is the same idea as pasta waiting for no one — some things in this class you do ahead, and some things you do at the very last second, and salad dressing is a last-second thing.
That's the whole three-minute salad now, start to finish. Wash it, dry it stupid dry, dress it right before it hits the table. No cooking, no timer, no stress, and it makes the plate look like you tried harder than you did.
Before next time: if you don't have a salad spinner, grab one on your next Macey's or DI run, they're cheap even new. And try the towel-drying method once at home just so you know you can do it without one.
~devin