What is the proper way to prepare lettuce and other salad greens?
There are many types of salad greens. Some “greens” aren’t even green! The Cook’s Thesaurus has an excellent page with a listing of salad greens with photographs. If you are unsure what arugula is, you’ll find a photo and description of what it looks and tastes like. Recently, there have been many plastic “knives” being marketed for cutting lettuce. The idea is that is the metal of knives that turns lettuce brown. Not true. Cutting lettuce with a knife (including plastic knives) will cause it to brown more quickly. When you cut lettuce, it cuts through the cell walls of the lettuce, releasing the retained moisture in those cells, and thus quick deterioration. There is the theory that when you tear lettuce by hand, it rips apart at the cell wall, not through them. McGill University’s Office for Science and Society gives us the how: Normally within a cell the enzymes and the polyphenols are separated, but but when cell walls are damaged, as in cutting an apple or tearing lettuce, their c
