Lettuce Salads Can Be Interesting, Tasty, Too

To my mind, the best salads begin with assorted young lettuces at their tender prime. For sheer tastiness (not to mention a remarkable infusion of vitamins, dietary fiber, minerals and trace elements all bundled in a luscious package), it’s hard to beat a generous mound of freshly plucked greens tossed with the sheerest veneer of finest oil, then accented with a couple of splashes, dashes and grinds of some sassy acid.

Many are the zealots who eschew iceberg in any form. Dismissed as the Styrofoam of the produce world, gourmets flee from firm head lettuce. I don’t buy that. To my way of thinking, a few prime chunks of iceberg provide a crunchy texture undertone.

Of course, don’t stop there. Today’s market offers a smorgasbord of greens on which to build.

The first rule in savvy salading is balance. Pair milder, sweeter, more tender greens (red leaf or traditional leaf, bibb, butterhead) with lettuce varieties that feature bolder, more pronounced flavors and crunchier, more fibrous or slightly tougher characters (curly endive or chicory, arugula, dandelion leaves, oak leaf lettuce, Belgian endive, etc.)

If money’s tight, stick with your favorite “lettuce ordinaire” - say, romaine - then bolster the flavor with a modest fistful of pricier leaves. It’s surprising the difference a few cents worth of raddichio or even freshly chopped red cabbage can make.

How you handle the lettuce during the time that lies between shopping and salad-making is almost as important as what you’ve actually brought home.

Lettuce is fairly perishable. To understand why, look at the structure of a single lettuce leaf. You’re confronted by a delicate bit of tissue. Sure, some varieties will weather a week or more in your refrigerator’s crisper, but the tenderest varieties ought to be used up within two or three days of purchase.

Washing lettuce calls for quick work and a ginger touch. Just as those sheer leaves harbor potent nutrients, many of those vitamins are water-soluble - meaning that lettuce will readily shed valuable substances when submerged in water.

Short course: Don’t soak lettuces, or even leave them in water for more than a few moments. The surest way to clean lettuces while preserving their storehouse of healthfulness is to tear whole leaves from the stems in order to reveal the places where soil is most apt to cling, then rinse them (rubbing with fingertips as needed) under cool running water.

The advent of the salad spinner used to strike me as the height of silly gadgetry, until my first tiny apartment kitchen, that is. Suddenly that pricey investment seemed the greatest of economies. No trotting out to the back porch or behind shower curtains to shake the washed leaves. A few quick cranks does the trick.

If you must store washed lettuce - say, in advance of a big party the next day - stash it in a clean pillowcase that’s been wrung out in cold water. That’s generally sufficient for overnight refrigeration, but it won’t hurt if you first tuck the green-stuffed case in an oversized plastic bag. (The cotton holds the right amount of crispness-preserving humidity, while the plastic shields the greens from the rapid evaporation that some frost-free refrigerators hasten.)

To tear or to cut? Lore has it that lettuce cut with a knife oxidizes more rapidly, turning the cut edges unpleasantly brown. While it’s true that tearing leaves into bite-sized morsels slows that process, it’s OK to pull a blade if you’ll be dressing the salad right away.