Rolling lettuce is a good way to keep large
quantities of
lettuce dry and relatively
fresh for use in
foodservice. If you need to prepare lots of
salad on short notice, you'll want to have lots of washed and dried lettuce on hand, because
washing lettuce is a fairly
time-consuming process, and you'll probably need to give it some time to dry because
wet lettuce in your salad isn't very good.
You'll need a bunch of clean bath or beach towels. Preferably a kind with My Little Pony illustrations or the like, just to make the process of rolling lettuce a bit less dull. Start by cutting off the butt of the head of lettuce, and dropping the leaves into your sink full of cold water. Throw away the smaller yellow leaves in the center of the head, they'll just make it harder to roll and they taste slightly bitter. Once you've filled the sink with a few heads of lettuce, agitate. Try to keep your fingers straight and just push the lettuce around; you don't want to grab it or the lettuce will bruise. Lift the clean lettuce into a large colander to drain and start washing some more lettuce. Once you've filled the sink with lettuce again, you should begin laying the draining lettuce onto a towel. You don't want to have the lettuce overlap or it won't dry properly and it won't last as long, but you don't want the leaves too spread out or you'll use up more towels than you need to. Also, make sure that the lettuce is all aligned on the towel so that when you roll it the lettuce won't break. Once the towel is covered in a nice sheet of lettuce, roll it loosely and wrap your roll with tape to keep it closed.
Now you've got clean, dry lettuce ready for all your lettuce needs.