Tips for Freshness Lettuce and Kale
Hi Everyone. With the weather seemingly hotter than normal and fresh food harvesting, I thought I could provide a couple tips to keeping your produce fresh looking and lengthen the time for storing it and eating it not all at once!
Enjoy and please feel free to comment and post other tips or links that may help others to keep their food fresh. Again, thanks for supporting our farm!!
I found a couple interesting tips on keeping lettuce fresh after a harvest.
Rinse in cold water and tear off the leaves and dampen them off and store them in a colander with a loose plastic wrapping over the top. I did try this and it worked for me. I am enjoying a lettuce mix that has lasted at least 10 days or more. Occasionally I dip into the mix if I cannot eat a salad every day and make a smoothie of my choice! Just a little bit of this and that and grind it up in the blender. Taste is great and refreshing.
If no time to rinse, I read you can tear the leaves off the core and place them in a container of ice cold water (sometimes ice cubes) and let it soak for 10-20 minutes. I have only done this once but did it about 10 minutes. This will also bring back Spinach leaves too or other greens similar in nature to lettuce. Then store in a container or in a plastic bag with a damp paper towel and refrigerate.
Kale clippings I guess are all about moisture. This time when I harvested the day before I put them in a zip lock bag and put a damp cloth in the bag and laid the kale on it and zipped the bags up. I placed them in the cooler and in our walk in cooler until it was time to pack them in your CSA shares. I was amazed that this worked. I guess you can use paper towels rather than cloth rags. I just didn’t have paper towels at the time.