Have you ever started the week full of good workday-salad intentions - you pack up lovely crispy vegetables in the evening - you're looking forward to the colourful delight at the end of a busy morning - you open up your tupperware and.... it's all limp lettuce, slimy cucumber and fermenting tomatoes?
Before making my meal last night, I threw together enough salad for the family (that's OH, 12yo, 9yo and me) to eat over the next 24 hours. I make it sound easy don't I? Throwing it together IS easy. But, what about keeping it fresh? Yep that's easy too.
Read on - not only will you learn the two most important factors in keeping salad
crisp, but I'll tell you how I make salad that will be as appetising in 24 hours as it is when I make it.
Monday is a busy night for us - we ALL eat at different times, so I made my own meal plus 7 salads, That's one for with my Quorn Chilli (I'll let you have the recipe later, I promise), one for the OH's meal when he gets home, three for packing up in boxes for lunches tomorrow and two more for tomorrow's evening meal (Tuesday is a bit all over the place too!).
Over the years, I've learnt several tricks for keeping salads bright and fresh - some ideas I picked up on holiday nearly twenty years ago, most I've made up as I go along and others I've only learnt in recent weeks.
Use it Up
If, like me, you know you'll be needing several portions of salad over the next 24 hours, then a good habit to start is using up your vegetables in one go. For example, if you're making five salads, then why only use bits of vegetables here and there, leaving the open ends to go limp? Use a lettuce head, a whole cucumber, several peppers. It's also easier to keep on top of what's going on in the fridge and you won't end up with half eaten, long-forgotten bags of wilted leaves hiding under the new greens.
Lettuce Knife
This one is new to me. Or rather, I'm new to it. I've been thinking of buying one of these
plastic knives for years, but somehow I thought it was some sort of con, like good bacteria yoghurt and spirolina. But, a few weeks ago we made the decision to all eat a lot more salad and we invested in lots of plastic boxes and lunch bags, and along with that other longed for accessory, the
salad spinner, I bought the knife.
The theory is that plastic will not cause the lettuce to oxidise or brown. Bad Science is a pet-gripe of mine and I have still not found an adequate explanation of this. However, using the plastic knife seems to work. I'll get to work tomorrow and I know my lettuce will look fresh and the edges won't be brown (well this would be true if I'd remembered to use the plastic knife. Oops!).
Scoop the Cucumber
The second most important thing you can do to keep salad crisp, is not allowing wet vegetables to come into contact with dry. The MOST important thing is to keep the box at the right humidity. Both of these are much easier to achieve than you'd think.
All vegetables will leave a wet edge when you slice it. Why is a 'wet edge' a problem? If you're eating salad soon after eating it, it's not a problem. But, if left exposed this will turn either soggy or extremely dry, depending on various properties of the vegetable and the humidity. When it touches nice dry edges, they too will get wet and eventually slimy. So, how do you avoid the 'wet edge'? Let's start with the worst offender. Cucumber.
Whilst on holiday in Tunisia - too long ago to count - I spotted, among the salad, a strange new vegetable. The green crescent shapes looked a bit like sliced celery, and I thought this was some exciting African food I'd never seen before. I had to try it! I'm sure you're already a step ahead of me here. It was, of course, cucumber. I knew straight away what they'd done to the vegetable and why. The salad was fresh and the cucumber had been cut in a way to allow the whole thing to remain that way while on display (in the all-you-can-eat buffet) for a fair time without suffering.
As soon as I got home (OK, I unpacked and went shopping first!) I tested my theory and it worked! Here's how:
- Wash the cucumber (you'd do that anyway, but I have to say it or my OCD hands get dirty).
- Slice off the stalk and discard.
- Starting from this stalk end, slice the cucumber until you start to see the seedy mush in the core. These slices without the core are fine to go in your salad.
- Now, cut across the cucumber making a chunk about 4 inches long.
- Upend this piece and carefully slice down the middle making two semi-circular lengths.
- With a teaspoon scoop out the seedy centre of one piece and discard the mush.
- Dry the 'boat' shaped piece you are left with, using a paper towel.
- On a dry surface, slice this piece into crescents and add to your salad.
- Repeat with the other half.
There, done. Easy wasn't it? Once you've done it once, it becomes second nature and you'll wonder why you put up with soggy cucumber for so long.
Leave the Leaves
Leaves often make up the bulk of a salad - rocket, watercress, lambs lettuce, pea shoots - more and more tasty options are becoming available and they're all great for adding a boost of iron and iodine to your vegetarian diet. They are probably the easiest part of your meal. Just wash and dry them (a quick whizz in the salad spinner is fine) and chuck them in.
Tomato Hack
Sliced to omatoes - another wet surface to keep away from the lettuce. One option is to keep the tomatoes whole and this is easy with cherry tomatoes or those tomberries that were in all the shops a couple of years ago (Whatever happened to them?). Or you could slice them - with cherry tomatoes slice 99% of the way through, then push it back together. They'll stay like that until you eat, then easily fall apart as you tuck in. Larger tomatoes are just as easy, but instead of almost slicing in half, you almost slice in eighths - like segments of an orange.
Don't Sweat the Wet Stuff
If you're going to enjoy salad as a meal rather than a side dish, then you'll want to add interest with something like cheese (cheddar, feta, Stilton), pasta, grated carrot or beetroot, dressing, oil, lemon juice, veggie sausage, coleslaw, cottage cheese, olives, houmus - all delicious but not suitable to keep next to your salad leaves all day. Keep them separate in a small box or sandwich bag and then pour on your meal when it's time to eat.
Easy Onions
Chopped onions you can do either way. I prefer to keep them separate, but as long as there aren't too many you can add them to the leaves from the start if you prefer. However, I've come up with a great hack that keeps the salad leaves dry and is easy and mess-free to prepare - spring onions (also known as salad onions or scallions). They can be chopped almost all the way to the top of the green so there's little waste. But the easiest way to prepare them is just to chop them over your salad with a pair of scissors. I use scissors a lot in the kitchen - two blades and no chopping board. Easy!
What's left?
So, there's your list of how to prepare all these vegetables to get the best out of them up to 24 hours later. Is there anything that doesn't need special treatment? Yes. Wash all vegetables, of course, but after that the following can be sliced and will be just fine: carrots, radish, courgette, cabbage, edible flowers, herbs, peppers, chillis, brocolli and cauliflower. And of course seeds and nuts.
Fill Her Up
The atmosphere your salad is stored will determine the success of all your hard work. If it's too wet, as we already discussed, you'll be left with a soggy mess. But what if it's too dry? Not quite so catastrophic, but still not too appetising. So how do you keep the food at just the right humidity?
As long as there isn't too much air freely flowing around your salad then the moisture will stay locked in. The answer is to fill the box to just over the top and then push the lid on. Don't overfill it or your leaves will be fighting for space and get bruised. Under fill it and there'll be too much air and they'll dry out.
If you're only eating a small salad then use a small box. The key is filling it to the brim.
However, humidity doesn't just depend on the space inside the box, but also on temperature...
Keep Cool
One final consideration, although arguably the most important - keep it cool. If you have a fridge at your workplace, perfect. If not then you should seek out a cool place to store it - a dark cupboard or under the desk - and if you have a cool bag and ice packs even better, but don't put ice packs inside the box or you'll damage your veg. You might also want to consider the safety of keeping ANY food out of the fridge, especially dairy produce and houmus.
3 Square Salads
With all this experience of salad preparation you'd be forgiven for thinking raw veg makes up the mainstay of my diet. I wish! One look at my thighs and you'd not be surprised to learn that today my diet has been more along the lines of shredded wheat and raisins with soya milk, quorn chilli and rice, three apples, rhubarb yoghurt, Sunbites rosemary and onion pittas, dark chocolate coated corn thins, nutty bar, snickers and ... salad. And I've not even thought about tea yet.
Diet starts tomorrow?
UPDATE: OH didn't eat his salad on Monday night, so I brought it in work today. 40 hours after making it, it's still crisp and fresh and I'd have no qualms about leaving it another 24 hours in the fridge.
