How I Went from Skipping Salads to Making Them Every Single Day

For a long time I bought pre-washed salad bags and told myself it was a reasonable shortcut. The lettuce always seemed a little wet, a little sad, and it went limp faster than I wanted it to. Salads felt like a hassle even though they were supposed to be the easy meal.

My problem was not the salad. It was that I was skipping the one step that makes a salad actually good, which is getting the greens dry before you dress them. Wet lettuce means dressing slides off. Dry lettuce means dressing sticks and every bite has flavor. A salad spinner is what closes that gap.

The OXO salad spinner uses a pump mechanism instead of a pull cord. You press the button in the center repeatedly and the basket spins inside the bowl. A brake button stops it instantly when you want it to slow down. It takes about 10 seconds of pumping to dry a full head of romaine or a bag of mixed greens, and the water collects at the bottom of the outer bowl.

The outer bowl is 6.22 quarts, which is large enough to hold a big salad for four people. Once the greens are spun, you can pull out the inner basket and use the bowl as a serving dish. That is one less thing to wash, which I appreciate when I am already cleaning up after dinner.

The lid locks flat when not in use, so storage is easy. It does not take up a huge footprint in the cabinet. We have ours in a lower cabinet and it stacks cleanly with other things.

Since getting this, I actually make salads regularly. Not because salads became more exciting, but because the process is less annoying. I wash the greens, spin them dry, and they stay crisp in the fridge for a few days in the basket. The OXO design means the lid stays on during storage, so the basket is basically a salad container too.

At $30 it is not a throwaway purchase, but it is one of those things where you notice the difference every time you use it. If salads keep getting skipped in your house because they feel like too much work, this is probably the fix.

→ Check it out on Amazon