Preparing Greens for a Salad

Lettuces or other leafy greens are most often the main ingredients in salads. There are many, many varieties of salad greens available year-round, each with its own unique character, flavor, and texture. They range from delicate, tender lettuces such as mâche (also known as lamb’s lettuce), Boston, and Bibb, to hearty, rather tough greens from the chicory family such as radicchio and escarole. Currently, one of the most popular salad ingredients is mesclun (mix), which was originally a French mixture of wild baby field greens, but has come to mean a mixture of the leaves of different types of cultivated lettuces and greens, some baby and some mature.