Washing, Drying and Storing Lettuce

Washing and Storing Lettuce - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Hi, I am Medea Allen from Organic Soul Chef and I would like to share some tips with you on how to wash, dry and store your lettuce. It is a lot of work but I just want to ease the pain a little bit. Some lettuces are dirtier than others, we all know this. I actually have a fairly decent head of red leaf here and it is not too dirty but just know that things like spinach is going to require a bit more time than the less dirty ones. You are going to have dirt in between the crevices of the leaf of the lettuce. So a really nice trick I like to do is slice the tip, the root, right off. Then, just start to release the lettuce leaves and some of the dirt will start to fall out the more looser, but then you are just want to have a lot of packed in dirt. The key to really releasing the vegetable from all that dirt is to have a big enough bowl with water that you are going to separate the dirt from the lettuce. I have a nice, deep bowl of water here that I am washing my lettuce in. Again, you want to have enough space between the bottom of the bowl and the top so that all the dirt can actually fall to the bottom. Once you have sufficiently cleaned it, this is going to save you a lot of time. A salad spinner, that is what I have. So this is how you would dry it. You could certainly roll the lettuce in say, a kitchen towel and do that a few times to get that excess water off. This works like a charm. You simply put the lettuce inside and then you push down and then it just works by releasing the water through spinning action. You do that a few times and what will happen is that your water is going to collect at the bottom. You dump the water and then you just keep spinning until it is dry. And how to store it? I actually store it right in my salad spinner with a paper towel on top because there is going to be moisture and you want the paper towel to actually take up some of the moisture. Moisture causes decay. So that is my tips on washing, drying and storing lettuce.