Greens without Guilt

Tonight I made a spinach and cheese omelet for dinner and I didn't rewash the pre-washed spinach.

This may not seem odd to you, but in the past, every time I decided not to wash already-washed greens, a little voice in the back of my brain (it sounded suspiciously like my mother) said "You don't know whether they really did a good job!")

This week, though, I was catching up on magazines I didn't read during the move, and one of them was a past edition of Chef's Illustrated in which the kitchen staff reported on testing the bacteria count of various pre-washed greens before and after rewashing them.  Their conclusion: Rewashing the greens actually introduced contamination.

What a relief.  If the scrupulous staff at Chef's Illustrated couldn't improve the cleanliness of salad greens by rewashing them in their professionally cleaned kitchens, I certainly can't.  In the future I'm going to blithely throw those pre-washed greens into the salad bowl or the cooking pot without a second thought - or perhaps with a sense of relief.

Salad "freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating." ~Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)