How to prevent watery salads and sad pools of dressing at the bottom of your bowl.

Drying salad greens well is important. Dressing slips off wet lettuce and gets diluted by the extra water, leaving you with barely dressed greens and a pool of bland dressing-water at the bottom of your salad bowl. But drying salad greens is also a pain in the neck, a time-consuming chore for a simple dish. So let physics help you out and buy yourself a salad spinner.

Yes, it’s bulky, but it pulls triple duty as a mixing bowl and colander as well. And it employs a handy phenomenon called centripetal force: when objects spin around a central axis, the motion forces stuff away from the center at high speeds, in this case droplets of water on your greens. Essentially, it’s a clothes dryer for lettuce, and since it distributes a lot of force evenly across your greens, it’s far more efficient than wringing greens out with kitchen towels.

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