Keeping salad fresh?

overtonhayes

DH and I have given up buying salad, because it always goes bad before we can use it, but we're starting to miss it. We buy the bags of mixed salad: not the kind that come with dressings, croutons, etc, just bags of mixed salad leaves. We used to buy heads of each different kind and make our own salad with it, but we don't eat enough salad to see big savings and never saw any difference in how long it lasted. But with the bags that we've been buying, we find that we get, at most, two days' use out of them. Usually it's starting to brown the next day.

What I've been doing/not doing:

- I never add any of my other ingredients (tomato, dressing, etc) to the salad mix
- I've tried storing it in tupperware. Maybe we just have very terrible tupperware, but it made no difference whatsoever
- I've tried storing it in a ziplock bag which I suck the air out of
- No noticeable difference between storing it in the veggie drawer vs on the shelf in the fridge

Is moisture the problem? That might sound stupid, but I know lettuce has a lot of water in it so I'm not sure whether it goes soggy because it's losing moisture of because there's too much of it. I'm thinking of storing the salad with some uncooked rice to absorb the extra moisture? What do you think?

evh31

I store mine in tupperware, but I have a layer of paper towel between the lettuce and the plastic.  You will be shocked how long it stays fresh.

DZKathryn

Like the poster above I store mine in a glass tupperware like container with a paper towel to help absorb the moisture. I sometimes also will dry salad in between transferring from the bag to the container. I lay out a towel, pour the salad on and lightly press to remove some of the moisture before I store it. It really helps, a bag will last at least a week, usually longer.

lovethebeach16

I have a hard time getting the bagged kinds to last longer than a few days usually too. I know this sounds silly, but are you checking the expiration dates before you buy it? I noticed that at almost every store I shop, the expiration date is only 1-2 days in the future. It drives me batty.

I run the lettuce through a salad spinner, dry it off and then transfer it to a ziplock bag and put it in the crisper drawer. I can usually get another 3-4 days out of it that way.

snapdragon1222

When I was in school and working in the cafeteria we stored all the leafy greens in a big pail of water and kept it in the fridge. That's a practice that I've carried into my personal kitchen and it work very well. When you are ready to use your greens take out what you need and put it in a salad spinner. Good luck!