You Might Be Using Your Salad Spinner Incorrectly — Here’s How You Should Be Doing It
It is the story of my life to use a product incorrectly and have absolutely no clue what I’m doing. I’ve always been the type of person to discard instructions and jump right into figuring it out myself. Sometimes this method works, and I am happy with the results. But it honestly comes as no surprise when doing this leads to me royally doing something wrong. It’s for this reason alone that when I came across America’s Test Kitchen‘s video showing the correct way to use a salad spinner, I was not surprised that I had been doing this wrong the whole time.
Much like Kate Shannon — who reviews equipment and ingredients for the site — I would use the bowl as a strainer and run my greens under some water in the kitchen sink until they seemed well rinsed. If I felt that wasn’t enough, I would repeat the same steps before returning the bowl to the spinner and spinning them dry.
Here’s the right way to do it. First, place your greens inside the basket, but instead of rinsing them in the basket alone, place your basket of food inside the outer bowl and fill it with water. Thoroughly soak the contents, then pull out the basket and let the water drain out. Then, empty out the outer bowl and repeat until the food is dirt-free.
Next, return the basket to the bowl and spin its contents dry. If there is a lot of water coming off the food, remove the basket, dump the excess water, and continue spinning. That’s it! The bowl and insert act as a colander-and-container combination, ultimately making this process much more effective than just running your greens under water. So simple, but so effective!
Now that we are on the topic of working smarter, not harder, you’ll want to check out this $2 trick to eliminating stinky kitchen smells using activated charcoal. And don’t forget about these three smart tips to creating an open and clutter-free kitchen that come straight from a design expert and will transform how you use your kitchen for the better.