I'd been meaning to search for tips on how to keep lettuce fresh, and I finally got around to it today.
I visited about a dozen websites which all said about the same: use damp paper towels to wrap the head of lettuce and then seal it in a plastic bag or container. I'd heard of that before, tried it out, and wasn't terrible successful.
Then finally I found one site that had a piece of advice by someone who claimed to have worked in the food service industry for thirty years. My gut feeling was that they might have something new to offer.
Indeed! The advice I discovered for keeping lettuce fresh was to try and minimize the amount of temperature changes the lettuce experiences, based on the premise that lettuce is very sensitive to even minor changes in temperature. That definitely jives with some experiences I have had myself.
Sometimes it would seem like a head of lettuce I would use little pieces of occasionally over a day or two would go bad, while another head of lettuce I bought by accident, not knowing I already had a head of lettuce, would stay relatively fresh since it was simply chilling out in the back of the refrigerator!
I think that in the future, instead of taking the whole head of lettuce out of the refrigerator and leaving it out for a few minutes while I get ready to work with it, I'll instead just grab several leaves from it while its still in the fridge.
If I don't use all the leaves I'll probably try the paper towel method again! And if the entire head of lettuce gets a little wilted, I'll also try dousing it in cold water, even chopping off a bit of the bottom and sticking it in cold ice water.
A big thanks to "Chef Lawrence"!!
