My wife and I ended up settling on a quick and easy spaghetti dinner for dinner last night and, while she was at the store, she decided a salad would be the perfect thing to go with it.
We already had plenty of tomatoes (thanks to my garden) so, since we were on a budget, she was just going to save money by buying fresh lettuce. However, as she was doing that, she noticed bagged salads from a brand we had never heard of before; Little Salad Bar. Since these weren’t any more expensive than buying the lettuce (which we would have had to cut up), she picked out their Italian Style variety.
I have had bagged salads in the past and have discovered the quality varies quite a bit by the brand. I won’t say this brand was the worst one I have ever had. But, it was easily one of the worst.
Since, in actuality, I rarely eat a lot of salad anyway (I’ll usually have a small salad and then just pick out the tomatoes), I’m not overly picky. However, there are two things I do expect when I buy a bagged salad. The first is freshness and the second is cleanliness. This particular brand of bagged salad failed in both categories.
First, as far as freshness goes, this didn’t even come close to passing. We just bought this salad and had quite a bit of time before the best by date. Yet, even as we opened it, we noticed the lettuce was already starting to wilt. It wasn’t brown yet. But, I was pretty certain that was going to change overnight (something my wife confirmed for me at lunch today).
When it came to the cleanliness part, this salad just tasted dirty, even after we took the time to wash it (something we rarely do with bagged salads). And, it was a taste that lingered in our mouths after eating it; fortunately it didn’t end up ruining the rest of our dinner for us.
Another thing I didn’t like about this salad is it had a lot of hard to chew pieces in it. There were chunks that were stringy and I ended up spitting them out after trying to chew them for a couple minutes. I have had that with other salad brands before too. But, this was the first time I had that large of a quantity.
This bagged salad brand might have been affordable but it definitely was not worth our money. I have no intentions of buying it again.