Great Salad Experiment - Part 2

Two weeks ago I made a bunch of salads in vacuum sealed jars , and it worked quite well. I decided to end the experiment here and see how everything turned out.

The Romaine lettuce looked OK. It's starting to dry out a little and there's a tiny bit of browning on a few edges. I'd say a week or maybe a week and a half is probably what you should aim for, but it would still be usable but not as great after two weeks.

And at least in the airless vacuum sealed jar, lettuce cut with a metal knife looks pretty much identical to the torn lettuce.

The vacuum sealed green pepper seemed kind of wet, but it was still fairly firm. It's definitely an improvement over a ziplock bag, and the cut one in a vacuum bag seems to last longer than an uncut one loose in my refrigerator. I might start vacuum sealing all of my green peppers.

The vacuum sealed cucumber was the least successful, however at two weeks that's much longer than you'd expect a cucumber to survive. After cutting off the open end, however, the rest of it was surprisingly good. Still, I think two weeks is too long for a cut cucumber.

The cut yellow onion started to expand a bit, as cut onion tends to do, but the texture seemed fine and it still looked pretty good after two weeks. And the vacuum bag definitely helps keep your refrigerator from smelling like onion.

So that's everything from the first round of experiments. The next experiment involves green leaf lettuce and baby spinach , and the results are looking very good so far.