For some reason, I always think prewashed, bagged salad has an off taste, too -- like it has some kind of preservative on it or something. In a previous life (lol!) when I worked as a cook in a restaurant, we used to wash the lettuce in some kind of preservative to delay the browning after it was cut. That's what bagged salad tastes like to me.

I have the OXO salad spinner and LOVE it!

Aderyn

It's true, they run it through an anti-oxidant and that's why it has that taste. I always wash my bagged lettuce and spin it dry. Kinda defeats the purpose but I like having small amounts of different varieties around, since it's only DH and myself!

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Veni, vidi, velcro. I came, I saw, I stuck around.

Save the Earth - it's the only planet with CHOCOLATE!

I suspected as much. I'm with you; I buy the bagged greens for variety, but still wash and spin them.

Aderyn

Well, that certainly explains why my salads taste so much better these days now that I buy heads and prepare the lettuce myself.

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>^..^<
Esther

Ain't it the truth!

Way back in 1980 I worked for SunHarvest in what was called the "shred plant" - we were the first ones to provide shredded bagged lettuce and salad (iceberg, shredded carrots and red cabbage) to Burger King and the like. I was in Sales, but if I went downstairs into the processing plant, I could SMELL the stuff they used - back then I believe it was a very dilute bleach solution.

Not sure if they use the same thing now or not but I started washing bagged lettuce way back then!

Char

__________________
Veni, vidi, velcro. I came, I saw, I stuck around.

Save the Earth - it's the only planet with CHOCOLATE!

Whatever we used at the restaurant came in a powdered form and we used to mix a small amount with a large quantity of water (like a couple tablespoons to about 50 gallons of water). For some reason, I seem to think it was a nitrite or nitrate of some kind. It had kind of a bleachy smell, but not like chlorine -- more like an oxygen bleach, maybe. It definitely had a bleaching effect, because we would use it not only initially to help prevent browning, but also for lettuce that was beginning to brown, which could often be "rescued" for one more day by giving it another swish through the solution.

Aderyn