I love salad. I hate salad spinners.
How are you supposed to wash and store the damn things?
I love salad. I hate salad spinners.
More precisely, I hate cleaning salad spinners. There is no good way to get them thoroughly clean. It’s nearly impossible to free all the tiny bits of lettuce and other salad greens from the colander-like insert. And even if you succeed, there is still no guarantee that you will get all the micro-surfaces of the insert totally clean.
Salad spinners are too big to put in the dishwasher; you would need an industrial-size dishwashing machine, the kind they have in restaurant kitchens. And then, after your doomed-to-fail attempt to get the salad spinner clean, there is the impossibility of getting all the surfaces dry enough to store the contraption.
And where are you even going to store it? The things are so big and unwieldy, and ideally it should be stored with all the parts separated so as not to become an accidental terrarium or a breeding ground for mold. You really require an entire cabinet devoted to them and them only.
Salads are one of my favorite meals. When I make a salad, it includes everything but the kitchen sink. I start with salad greens and add chopped vegetables like radishes, cucumbers, bell peppers, avocado slices, tomatoes when and if they are good and in season, and stuff-I-don’t-even-know-what-it-is-that-my-wife-chops-up-precisely-for-this-purpose.
I toss in a healthy amount of chickpeas, pumpkin seeds, pitted black kalamata olives, fermented vegetables i.e. sauerkraut or the like, and a heap of feta. I often include chopped-up anchovies, or half a tin of tuna or mackerel. This salad is intended to be the whole meal, and so anything and everything goes (except for pieces of cold, leftover chicken – the only thing cold chicken is good for is a chicken salad along the lines of a tuna salad. Two of my least-favorite words are “Cobb salad”).
The oil from the tinned fish is often all the salad needs for topping off, and, if I am feeling especially ambitious, I add one or more of the following: herbed salt, the juice of half a lemon, a dash of balsamic vinegar.
What’s not to like about that? What’s not to love about it? It tastes delicious, you can eat as much as you want, it can be incredibly filling, and after you eat it you feel totally virtuous for preparing such a healthy meal for yourself. Ice cream, in this case, can be your reward. You’ve earned it! You ate salad for dinner!
But then, once you have enjoyed your salad, tailor-made to your own specifications, to your particular likes and dislikes, and once you have rinsed and wiped the wooden salad bowl and put the rest of the stuff in the dishwasher, there it sits on the counter, the evil salad spinner, taunting you and daring you to try to get it clean and dry. No sight can take me as quickly from the spiritual high derived from making and eating the tasty, healthy, and virtuous salad to the deep low of clinical depression, at the thought of the impossible task that awaits.
It’s almost enough to put one off homemade salad for good.
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My latest salad spinner is collecting dust because I’m using a variation of Julia Child’s sister-in-law’s method of adding the salad greens to an impeccably clean pillowcase and spinning it around—outside. In place of the pillowcase, I use a clean tea towel. Towels dried with dryer sheets need not apply for this job. I use this method for whole-leaf lettuces. Shake the excess water off and lay a few lettuce leaves across the towel leaving an inch or two of space between them. Roll them up gently and grab both ends of the towel. Gently shake the towel letting it gently hit the surface of a counter and rotate the towel as you go. It takes practice but this method will dry lettuce even better than a salad spinner.
Almost my exact thoughts but I wash the 3 separate salad spinner parts, wipe and then let them dry on the counter. Sounds like a great salad but no anchovies, please!