Tips & tricks

Never bite into sand again: this is the best way to wash lettuce

Young woman with mouth stuffed with salad lettuce

Imagine this: you have a fresh, delicious salad in front of you (and sometimes there’s nothing better than a simple head of lettuce with perfect vinaigrette alongside your steak and fries, for example), you take a bite and CRUNCH – suddenly you’re chewing on a grain of sand or 10, or some other bit of dirt. Annoying, because you know there’s no saving it now, so you might as well chuck the entire salad in the bin. (No, composting won’t work either, because of the vinaigrette.) So from now on, you’ll want to prevent that…

 

Foto van culinair journalist Delilah Warcup - van Eyck

And if you made the salad yourself, read this and you’ll know how to wash lettuce properly next time. And if someone else served you this lettuce, just carefully send them the link to this article. From now on, this is how we’ll do it:

How to wash lettuce thoroughly and carefully

What you don’t want to do is hold those poor, delicate leaves under a fully opened tap with the force of a garden hose (because that’s what it feels like to them). They don’t even need to go under the tap at all; even rinsing them under running water doesn’t always remove all the soil.

A nice little bath

What you do want: gently let the leaves ‘swim’ in plenty of water for a moment. This loosens the dirt, which then sinks to the bottom. After this, you shouldn’t toss the lettuce and water into a colander, because you’ll simply pour the sand right back over it.

Peace and cleanliness

So make sure you have a large bowl, or use the sink (but only if you know it’s absolutely spotless). What I do is use the bowl from the salad spinner itself, with the colander inside. I fill it to the brim with water, add the (loose, torn-off) lettuce leaves, and let them sit for about a minute. Then I gently move my fingers through the lettuce, making a few meditative figure eights. After that, I quickly lift the colander with the lettuce out of the bowl, leaving all the dirt that has collected on the bottom behind. I rinse out the bowl and repeat the entire process (even if it’s only one batch of lettuce). Then I spin it dry (if it’s a large head, I do all of this in two batches), and continue preparing it.

That’s it, really simple, but definitely useful to know!

Also read:

 

 

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