Is It Better to Tear or Cut Lettuce?
Cooks have long been warned that cutting lettuce with a knife should be avoided; instead, the recommendation is to tear your greens. Cutting, the theory goes, does more damage to cell walls and thus leads to more enzymatic browning, which is created when ruptured cell walls release enzymes that trigger polyphenols to combine and form brownish pigment. Because tearing encourages the lettuce to cleave along cell walls instead of across them, the damage is supposedly less.
To see for ourselves, we gathered four different types of lettuce: iceberg, butterhead, romaine, and escarole. We tore half of each head into 2-inch pieces and cut the other half into similar-size pieces. We stored the leaves in partially open zipper-lock bags, placed them in the…
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Cook's Illustrated (Digital) - 1 Issue, March/April 2025