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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

The other day, my wife introduced me to yet another difference between Chinese cuisine and US cuisine: She cooked the Romaine lettuce she got from her coworker. She just cooked it like you'd cook Bok Choy. It was quite good!

My wife also rinses everything we get from the store. No one is to be trusted with your family's food. Absolutely everything is rinsed, including things most Americans would really rather not. One day, I had to work a bit to convince her to not rinse the steel cut oats!

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>Absolutely everything is rinsed

Don't rinse raw meat. It makes things worse!

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety...

Spoilers: Its not making things worse. It just provides an avenue for cross contamination, which you should be accounting for when preparing meat anyways.

In my experience, it makes the roasted meat worse. A lot of roasted meat works better if you dry out the outer layers with salt. Rinsing does the opposite.

I mean, unless I'm eating it completely raw (where is hope to practically know the cow by name) then washing the outside before cooking it seems like a complete waste of time.

The thought was to do it prior to seasoning to provide better coverage (after drying). Recipes switched to having you just pat the meat dry with paper towels to avoid the cross contamination vector.

Many restaurants in China serve cooked lettuce as a side, I found it quite odd at first but it's really tasty and with some soy sauce easy to eat by itself. Cooking lettuce in the western world will probably raise a few eyebrows.

I’ve gone to a few restaurants in the US that do a cooked version of a caesar salad that’s quite good. I’ve made it myself, too. Grill whole heads of romaine until they’re blackened and wilting, then dress and shave parmesean on them.

Well ... don’t do that now, I guess. But once the red alert is over, it’s pretty tasty.

Gordon Ramsay has something to say about cooked salads, and it’s hilarious.

I'm used to eating cooked collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, spinach, and kale but I don't know why it has never crossed my mind you could do the same with something like romaine or lettuce. I imagine it wouldn't be too different.

I’ve halved romaine lettuce and grilled it before with olive oil, salt and pepper topped with a light Vinaigrette. Quite tastey but difficult to grill. I’ve done it twice.

My wife’s eyebrows were raised both times. She thought it was weird but didn’t think it tasted bad.

It's a pretty standard hot pot ingredient in the U.S.

Rinsing is good at /gorse/ cleaning, getting the really big obvious, bad to chew, things off.

The cooking is the part that actually sanitizes the food.

A soup of puréed romaine is quite good as well.

I always cut and rinse lettuce, is that uncommon? Sounds interesting. I need to try stir frying romaine.

You can't rinse off what's physically inside the plant.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5404196/

You took that comment out of context. The parent implied that it was unusual for people to cut and rinse vegetables (I was replying it was not unusual for me). I never said that would resolve the E. Coli problem.

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