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I use bagged salads and don't wash them. I only occasionally see brown/spoiled leaves. Sometimes I just buy the romaine hearts that come 3 to a package and cut them up for my salads.
I think things like the romaine hearts are quite a bit different. I use those as well. they always are fresh and last quite some time. I feel the same with the baby spinach.
Location: Montreal -> CT -> MA -> Montreal -> Ottawa
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We used to buy field greens but, like you, we've found that there's a slime factor. Now we buy bagged spinach -- it never has slime and it stays fresh for a longer time.
By the way, if you have a Whole Foods near you, you can buy field greens there, from the bulk section. Bag as much as you want/need -- no waste and it's always fresh. And, contrary to what you might think, it's actually LESS expensive.
I always buy it. I hate having to wash lettuce and dry it. Takes too long, takes too much paper towel to dry it, and I hate water in the bottom of my salad. If you buy the ones with the longest away expiration date, and use it in a couple of days, it keeps fine. Except romaine. i always buy a mix that does NOT have romaine. It gets brown too fast. I make my lunch salads for the week on Sunday, with bagged salad mix I bought maybe Tuesday or Wednesday the week before, and by Thursday they're still fine. If i have any left over by the next weekend, they sometimes are getting icky. They're only $2.50-3.00 a bag, and that makes around 4 salads with lots of different veggies in with. Pretty cheap lunch! I just don't have the time to wash lettuce, AND if i bought each of the different kinds of lettuce that are in the bagged mixes, they would definitely go bad before I got it all eaten.
I much prefer fresh produce than cut/bagged, for that very reason. No issue eating it straight from the bag in terms of cleanliness, but often it just didn't taste as good to me, and I did have a few times where I found spoiled leaves.
Because I have had my share of mediocre bagged lettuce, I just buy whatever I want to put in my salad, chop it up, and make the salad from scratch. Always fresh, but it's more work, because I eat a salad every single night.
I eat a lot of salad too and I do not like the bagged or packaged salads. It's not always just a few spoiled leaves, but bacteria and oxidation. Anything chopped, from hamburger to veggies, has more surfaces to oxidize and spoil. The packages are not air tight and have been transported from pillar to post in all kinds of weather.
So- not wanting to prepare a salad from scratch every single day I bought a fairly large salad spinner. The reduced moisture from using the spinner lets things keep longer and stay crisp.
I thoroughly wash a head of lettuce, red leaf being my favorite, chop off the bottom, remove any parts that are questionable, chop it to bite size and put it in the spinner basket and rinse it again. Then I wash and slice a green, red, or yellow pepper, red (or green) cabbage, and use the potato peeler to get thin carrot slices. You can put in whatever you want, but softer veggies such as tomato slices will spoil the salad much faster. I rinse and spin the whole batch- getting it really as dry as possible. Then I put it in a large air tight container and refrigerate. Voila! Salad base for about 5 to 6 days.
I take out some of the lettuce mixture, put it in a bowl, and add whatever I want...tomatoes (cherry or slices), cucumber slices, shredded cheese, diced ham or turkey or steak, or tuna salad, or egg salad, or hard boiled egg slices, whatever-..... and top it with dressing. Takes only a few minutes to make a fabulous salad once the salad green base is already made. Also, it really doesn't take much longer to make a big bunch of salad than to make an individual salad- just a matter of making more while you're already at it.
The key is thorough rinsing, spinning really dry, and keeping in an air tight (burp-able) container in the refrigerator.
No matter if the lettuce or mixed green are bagged or not we always wash them with a special citrus soap to kill any possible bacteria.
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