salad spinners that have enough clearance so the basket is not in the water!?!

I have a huge beef with salad spinners.

They all have a basket inside a pot or bowl thing, and the basket spins around on a pin sticking up from the pot. 

My problems is WHY DO THEY MAKE THE PIN SO SHORT that the salad, after having been spun, is sitting in the water!!!!????

It seems so obvious to me, that you have to have a decent clearance between the basket and the pot, so the salad doesn't end up in the water.  It would take SO LITTLE to do, just a little brain power, make that little stick half an inch longer.  No big technology, not brain surgery, not rocket science. 

Now i have never owned an expensive salad spinner because it doesn;t seem that they are any better, but I would be willing to buy a good one, an OXO or soimething, if i could be guaranteed that it would have a deeper space between the basket and the bowl. 

Can anyone tell me if this exists, (and if not, WHY NOT?!)

i regularly have to spin the salad two or three or more times, and every time, it's sitting in the water - and gets wet again. 

KY, i use a spinner not to waste time - before having a spinner, which was for some 20 of my 40 odd years of cooking - I would vigorously shake handfuls (handsful?) of greens out one by one, and they came dry.  It didn;t take long, but it took longer than i wanted.

I want to wash them and spin  them - yeah, i could dry them first, but I like my tools to work for me, or i do it by hand.  Letting it sit - how long? a minute? five? I don;t really want to have to wait, which is why i have a spinner.  And if there are lots of crinkles in the leaves, like in nice romaine, the water catches in there anyway and doesn't drain.  The basket is not sitting immersed in water, but it touches the water which clings to the leaves at the bottom.  Even after the second time.  I usually have to spin 3 times to get dry leaves.

Prairiechef, I use the bowl of the spinner to wash the greens - I fill the pot with water, with the basket full of leaves already in it.  I swish them around with my hands and then lift the basket so the sand goes to the bottom, dump it and repeat.  When i complained about water sitting in the bowl and re-wetting the greens, someone gave me a spinner that had a hole at the bottom.  But then i had to use another bowl to wash them, without the convenience of the basket to lift out, so it just extended the time of salad washing. 

Once, my sister in law in the states had one that had a very deep channel all around the bottom of the base (bowl) that caught quite a lot of water - i asked her for one like that but she got me the one with the holes.  It was a no-name brand.  Never saw another like it.  The oxos that i;ve seen were sealed in a box or had an opaque bowl so i couldn;t see the clearance. 

You might say i'm fussy, but the problem is very simply solved by the manufacturer, make the &%*$@ pin a little longer.  It's not rocket science.  And you save time washing and drying the salad.  So, yeah, i could let it drain first, but why shouldn't a spinner be made that actually leaves the lettuce dry?  I wanted to know what spinner that might be

(Speed is of utmost for me - i often get home at 8:30 and have to start cooking.  Eating at 9 is already late for me - the idea of leisurely draining the greens would require too much advanced thought and/or time.)

Why the sarcasm Prariechef?  Have i offended you? 

I like things that work, things that are well-designed.  If they are labor saving devices, they should actually save labor. And if they can do it with very little effort on the manufacturer's part (well, a little mental effort but no added expense), why are they so poorly designed?  People have a million idiotic and wasteful gadgets in the house, like electric can openers, that require no less time or effort than crank operated ones.  People have food processors that occupy half a kitchen counter, and bread makers and every possible convenience contraption. I bet if i were asking for an ELECTRIC salad spinner noone would bat an eye. 

I am asking if anyone happens to know of a brand of spinner that has a very simple thing - a higher distance between the basket and the bowl.  I;ve bought five different types over the years and none of them have it.  I haven't tried an oxo, or the other expensive german brand (can't remember the name) but maybe someone has and can tell me if they have the characteristic I'm looking for.  That's not much to ask.  If it;s not a problem for you, it happens to be for me.  And if i have to SHAKE the water out, then i don't NEED a salad spinner - i did it like that for years. 

Thanks for your suggestions, but i guess it's not clear,  I'm a home cook.  I don't do 6 liters of greens, I don;t have anybody washing up for me, I certainly don;t have a thousand dollars to spend to wash my salad!  

I just want to know a very simple thing, is there a salad spinner out there that keeps the basket a reasonable distance from the water.  I'd pay a little more, if i knew that there was a more reasonable clearance than the slightly more than half centimeter that my current one has.

The kind with the hole that drains the water out is not an advantage for me, because salad spinners take up a lot of room in a small city kitchen so i want it to do more than one job.  I like to use the basket to wash all kinds of greens, even those that don't need to be spun (spinach to boil) because you can swish it around in the water and then lift it out all at once so the sand stays behind).  If it has a hole, it means getting some other pot out, and then pulling out the greens by handfuls, and that's no easier than spinning it three times when i do salad.  There is no saving of time.  And as i said, i HAD one like that, and didn;t like it.  

I guess i'm the only one who has this problem, or the only people who read this forum on equipment are professionals.  

Quote:

Originally Posted by chefedb 

All of them made for as you say "'The Home Cook"""have a bottom on them therefore none of them are any good. So after spinning, blot with paper towls

No, actually, I've seen plenty that have holes in the bottom, and a hole in the top where water is supposed to run in so supposedly you can wash the salad that way.  I don't find that a good way to wash greens, unless they're already clean - not when they're full of sand or snail droppings, as they often are here. 

There is no reason they can't have a bottom with a pin that holds the basket higher, however. In fact i did see one in someone's house, except the brand was not written on it.   Does anyone know the height of the oxo basket?  Or any other brand?  

I know i can dry with towels, but what is the point of a spinner, if i have to do it again by hand?  I did it all by hand in the past, so at that point, what is the advantage?  It would be like a dishwasher that you have to take the dishes out and rinse them a last time, or a food processor that only half chops the food, but you have to finish doing it with a knife! Or an electric mixer that only mixes the top half of the batter, and leaves the last half inch untouched.  Does anyone see my point? 

Thanks, Leeniek, 

I know there are many solutions, and even if I had all the leisure in the world, there are some tasks that i just find irritating because i know they could be simpler.  And because sometimes industries spend incredible amounts of time and money developing idiotic gadgets that save no time at all (electric can openers, for instance, which, unless you have only one hand, or terrible arthritis, really only take up space) but none on the simplest gadgets. 

If anyone should come across one that doesn't require spinning several times, please tell me.  I will run to buy it.  Like the better mousetrap, I'll beat a path to your door. 

As to a professional chef's opinions, I can understand if your job is to cook all day, you will do all sorts of things. You're being paid for it.  But I bet you definitely would NOT want to cut with a dull knife.  Not that it's impossible to cut and cook if you don;t have the best knife, but you wouldn't want to, and no one will say there are other solutions (like pressing harder, sliding the knife back and forth as you slice, etc).    Think of this as my dull knife. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeniek 
My salad spinner has bit the dust so at some point I need to get a new one... if I find one that has a decent lenghth pin I'll let you know.  My spinner was 22 years old and I am sure things have changed since it was first made...
 

Good luck, leeniek.  My feeling is that things have indeed changed, and usually for the worse!  Everyday stuff used to be made well and made to last, but today's stuff tends to be more and more crappy.  I think it's entropy!

Sorry, I was away for a while and didn't have easy access to internet.

Thanks KY for the elaborate experiment. So OXO it is, next time i buy a spinner.    (By the way, the hard plastic of the bowl - does that actually not crack?  i had a measuring cup made of hard plastic, actually two, and they both split with long, vertical cracks - but maybe it was another inferior plastic?)

Just to be more precise about my questions - I was not asking why a producer who already makes a salad spinner doesn;t retool their factory, but why all the dozens of brands around seem to be the same, with low clearance from the bottom - my answer is that, like most designers of home products, the person who designed it has never lifted a finger around the house and has no idea what are the practical aspects of their design.  I can name a dozen things off the top of my head that are badly designed like that.

Anyway, Looking more carefully at mine, i noticed that the basket, though always too low, with time has bent out of shape and tends to be higher in the middle and hang down around the edges, accounting for the water touching it and re-wetting the greens.  I tell you, i spin three times, and every time i have to dump a bunch of water out!  Three times is absurd, it would be like your washing machine washing the clothes only half way and always having to do them three times, or a peeler that only peels partly, and leaves half behind, or a pen that only writes half the time, so you have to go back and fill in the words it didn;t write!

One last thought - i recently read about some studies about complaining.  They divided people in two groups - one group wrote fifteen minutes a day on some banal facts, the tv they watched or the food they ate, something like that, and the other wrote complaints about all the things that went wrong that day.  At the end of the year, the complainers had been significantly healthier than the others, had far less sick days and far less flus and colds!  Complaining is good!  They did the same with people with severe arthritis, the complaint group reported less pain in regular doctor visits!

Anyway, thanks ky.  Didn't it work well to wash the greens directly in the spinner?  For me, the sink is always dirty with everything others have done with it during the day.  And why take out another bowl when you have your spinner bowl, with fitted basket to lift out?

thanks kokopuffs.  I think my dishwasher might actually not warp the plastic since it has no dry heating cycle, just a hot water rinse, and we have it set to a lower heat anyway.  The kind of splitting of hard transparent plastic i was afraid of happened without any apparent reason to a heavy plastic measuring cup my daughter had, before she even had a dishwasher - never figured it out.  I guess the spinner is of a better quality.