The Ultimate Guide To Lettuce and Salad Green Varieties (2024)

About Lettuce

True lettuces are members of the Lactuca sativa genus and species. "Lactuca" comes from the Latin word "lac" for dairy, in reference to the thick white latex the lettuce plant exudes when cut. Most varieties of lettuce are grown for their leaves, however one variety, celtuce (also known as stem lettuce), is grown for its thick stem.

In general,salad greens arecool weather crops, at their best in spring and early summer before high heat and long days make them bolt and turn bitter. Look for lettuce at farmer's markets year-round in ultra-temperate climates,falland spring in mainly temperate areas, and in the late spring through the summer months in cooler climates. Many lettuce varieties, like leaf lettuce and iceberg, can be found year-round at most supermarkets.

The multitude of lettuce varieties available at the grocery store and farmer's markets offer a wide range of textures, colors, and flavors, from frilly red leaf lettuce to tender and soft butter lettuce. Instead of a generic looking and tasting salad you're just eating for some roughage, you can toss together a beautiful and flavorful salad worthy of a fine dining restaurant in your own home kitchen.

Other greens featured here, including arugula, spinach, and watercress, are not in the lettuce family at all. However, we include them because they make salads more interesting. Arugula and watercress, for example, bring the peppery character of the mustard family to mild lettuce-based salads. Spinach, part of the amaranth family, has a slight acidic tang. By sprinkling these kinds of greens into your salads, you can "season" them before you even add dressing.

Green and Red Leaf Lettuce

Also Known As: Batavia lettuce, French crisp, summer crisp, leaf lettuce, looseleaf lettuce

What It's Like: Perhaps the best-known variety of lettuce, leaf lettuce is characterized by large heads of loosely arranged leaves (as opposed to the tight heads of, say, romaine) with ruffled tips. Mild-tasting, with only the slightest hint of bitterness, these greens have both tender leaves and pleasantly crunchy stems.

Where To Buy It: Red and green heads of this lettuce variety can be found at practically every grocery store.

How To Use It: This is the most versatile lettuce variety due to its mild flavor and can be added to any salad or piled inside sandwiches.

Romaine Lettuce

Also Known As: Cos lettuce

What It's Like: Romaine lettuce is hale and hearty and crispy crunchy. Generally mild with just a touch of bitterness, romaine's long slender leaves are perhaps even more versatile than looseleaf lettuce.

Where To Buy It: Like red and green leaf lettuces, romaine is available in supermarkets everywhere. You can find it in larger heads or sold as "hearts" with the large outermost leaves trimmed off.

How To Use It: Romaine is the ubiquitous lettuce in bothCaesar salads and Greek salads. Its crunchy texture can stand up to any dressing, from a light gingery vinaigrette to a full-blown thick and creamy bluecheese dressing. Due to its sturdy texture, it can even begrilled.

Butter Lettuce

Also Known As: Bibb lettuce, Boston lettuce, butterhead lettuce

What It's Like: Butter lettuce is a crisp-head lettuce, meaning its leaves form a compact head as it grows—although its head is much less compact thaniceberg lettuce. Butter lettuce has a tender texture, mild flavor (perhaps the mildest among all lettuces), and large, cupped leaves.

Where To Buy It: Butter lettuce is commonly available at most supermarkets. You often find it sold in clamshells with the roots still attached to prolong its shelf life and protect the tender heads from damage during shipping.

How To Use It: Butter lettuce's soft leaves work beautifully in salads, especially with delicately flavored dressings. The leaves are perfectly shaped to hold fillings as in lettuce cups.

Little Gems

Also Known As: Sucrine, sugar cos

What It's Like: A cross between butter lettuce and romaine, little gem lettuce is soft, though not as soft as butter lettuce, with a pleasant crunch and a delicate, sweet flavor.

Where To Buy It: Some supermarkets carry little gems, though they are still more of a farmer's market item.

How To Use It: Little gems' delicate flavor is well suited to light vinaigrettes andlemonydressings, though lighter creamy dressings are excellent as well. Little Gems are especially delicious with thinly sliced radishes or spears of gently steamed asparagus.

Frisée

Also Known As: Curly or curled endive

What It's Like: A beautiful whorl of pale to dark green leaves, this curly, frizzled green is a member of the endive family, and has all the bright bitterness and delicious crunch that goes along with that class of greens. Endives are part of the same family as lettuce (Asteraceae) but are in a different genus (Cichorium).

Where To Buy It: Frisée is available at some supermarkets, particularly those that offer more specialty produce.

How To Use It: Frisée is best known as the base for a classic French bistro salad that includes bacon and a poached egg on top and is also delicious in pear salads with blue cheese and walnuts.

Iceberg Lettuce

Also Known As: Crisphead lettuce

What It's Like: Sold in tight, round heads, iceberg lettuce has an undeniable crispness that gives it a satisfying crunch in the mouth. Very light tasting, this lettuce has a mild, sweet flavor.

Where To Buy It: Iceberg is perhaps the most ubiquitous lettuce variety, available at nearly every supermarket.

How To Use It: The classic mid-century American salad lettuce, iceberg has fallen out of favor as a salad green, but it's still unbeatable in a wedge salad and its crunch works wonders as a burger or sandwich topper.

Spring Mix

Also Known As: Mesclun

What It's Like: Spring mix is a mix of lettuces and other greens and can include baby romaine, spinach, mizuna, baby chard, and arugula, among other varieties. Most mesclun is planted as beds of mixed lettuce seeds and harvested when the leaves reach the desired size of 3 to 6 inches. This is an excellent mixed green to buy to get a variety of colors, textures, and flavors in one package.

Where To Buy It: All supermarkets carry spring mix, usually in clamshells. Look for mixes that contain young, sweet leaves from a variety of tender lettuces—maybe a bit of curly endive for texture, some peppery watercress or arugula forbite, and a few herbs.

Some farms and markets sell special "spicy" mixtures that have more arugula, watercress,mizuna, and mustard leaves.

How To Use It: Mesclun is often dressed with aclassic French vinaigrette, but it's a forgiving mix that works well with a wide range of dressings.

Arugula

Also Known As: Rocket, rucola, rugula, roquette

What It's Like: Arugula has dark green leaves and a peppery flavor. The leaves can be long and spiked or shorter and more rounded, but they all share that dark green color. In general, larger leaves tend to be stronger tasting, but if pungency is a concern, be sure to taste the batch before using.

Where To Buy It: Baby arugula is widely available at grocery stores. You may also find bunches of large arugula leaves at farmer's markets.

How To Use It: Use arugula alone to stand up to tangy dressings such aslemon garlic vinaigretteand bold flavors such as blue cheese, or mix it with other lettuces as an accent note. Arugula makes a bold and vibrant pesto and can be chopped up and used like an herb wherever a peppery flavor is desired.

Spinach

What It's Like: A relative of buckwheat and rhubarb, spinach is available in baby and mature varieties. Baby spinach is usually sold in clamshells and has tender leaves. Mature spinach is sold in bunches, has tougher, thicker stems, and is more suited to cooking.

Spinach has a mild flavor with a slight acidity. If you eat a lot of spinach, you may have noticed that it can make your mouth feel dry or chalky. This is because spinach is high in oxalates, a compound that, when combined with the calcium in your saliva, forms calcium oxalate crystals that do not dissolve in water.

Where To Buy It: Baby spinach is available at nearly every grocery store. Mature spinach can be a little harder to find, but it is commonly available at natural foods grocery stores or specialty grocers.

How To Use It: Baby spinach is best used in salads, and mature spinach is best cooked, though either can be used for salads and cooked applications. If you plan to cook with spinach, keep in mind that it shrinks down to a fraction of the volume. You'll need a pound of spinach for four servings of cooked spinach.

Radicchio

Also Known As: Italian chicory, radicchio di Chioggia

What It's Like: Radicchio is a type of chicory, belonging to the same genus as frisée. A visual standout in the produce department, radicchio's tight heads of deep purple leaves with white veining are rich in anthocyanins, compounds that help protect the plant from environmental stress.

Radicchio is bitter and there's no way around it. However, its bitterness can be tempered by quartering the head of radicchio and soaking it in cold water for up to an hour.

Where To Buy It: Radicchio is the most widely available of the chicories and can be found at most supermarkets. You can find more niche varieties of chicory, like treviso and la Rosa del Veneto (pink radicchio) at some farmer's markets.

How To Use It: If you're on the fence about radicchio's bitterness, quarter the radicchio, shred it, and add it in moderation to salads made mostly with other mild greens. If you can't get enough, you can make a radicchio-only salad by tearing the leaves in irregular pieces.

Radicchio is a hearty salad green (does that term still apply to a purple vegetable?) that can stand up to flavorful creamy dressings like Caesar or green goddess. It can even be braised or grilled.

Belgian Endive

Also Known As: Witloof chicory, chicory, witlof

What It's Like: Belgian endive is in the same genus as radicchio but it couldn't look more different! Instead of round, purple heads, this green comes in small, tightly packed heads that are wider at the base than at the tip. The leaves have wide, white central veins and delicate, pale green tips.

These tight, compact heads are packed with flavor and crunch. While they are bitter like other chicories, their bitterness is more delicate than that of radicchio.

Where To Buy It: Belgian endive is more of a specialty green, available at some high-end grocery stores.

How To Use It: While a popular way to eat endive is slowly and carefully braised to caramelized brown perfection, endive also adds a solid crunch to any salad, whether on its own or mixed with other greens. It tends to have a bit of a bitter edge, so knowyour audience or use them sparingly with other salad greens.

Dandelion Greens

What It's Like: Believe it or not, dandelions are in the lettuce family. While you are likely very familiar with this plant thanks to its tenacity in lawns across the nation, there is also a variety of dandelion that is cultivated explicitly for use as a culinary green.

Cultivated dandelion greens have larger, longer leaves and tend to be less bitter than their wild counterparts, though they are still quite bitter. You may even find dandelion greens with purple veins.

If you're interested in harvesting wild dandelion greens, look for them in early spring when the leaves are still small and tender. Very large, tough dandelion greens are not very good to eat. Make sure the location you are harvesting them from has not been sprayed with pesticides or herbicides.

Where To Buy It: If you're not up for a foraging adventure, find cultivated dandelion greens at some specialty supermarkets.

How To Use It: You can blanch and braise this dark leaf to tame its intense flavor, but if you like the strong taste, match it with strong acidic and/or pungent dressings.

Watercress

Also Known As: Yellowcress, cress, garden cress, upland cress, creasy greens

What It's Like: All cresses are members of the mustard family. Watercress has a bright, peppery flavor very similar to arugula. The leaves are tiny and the stems are thick and crunchy. The older watercress gets,the sharper its flavor becomes.

Watercress grows wild in streams in North America andEurope but is easily cultivated with the right irrigation. Much cultivated "watercress" is actuallygarden cress, which has slightly less bite and crunch than its watercress cousin.

Usecressas soon as possible, removing any yellowed or wilted leaves and making sure to dry it well before refrigerating it. This leafy green has a short shelf life.

Where To Buy It: A less common salad green, find watercress at some specialty stores or farmer's markets.

How To Use It: Watercress is prized for salads and gently wilted preparations. Tender stalks and roots are perfectly edible along with the dark green leaves.

Mâche

Also Known As: Corn salad, lamb's lettuce, field lettuce, field salad, feldsalat

What It's Like: Mâche, a member of the honeysuckle family, comes in lovely little rosettes of dark green leaves attached in groups of four or five at the roots. It has a bit more body than many lettuces and mixes well with other vegetables. Mâche has a very agreeable, mild flavor.

Mâche requires extra care whencleaningsince sand and grit tend to gather in thenubof roots holding each rosette together. Give it a few extra swishes in the water to get them clean.

Where To Buy It: Unless you live in France, mâche can be hard to find, though it is sometimes available at specialty grocery stores.

How To Use It: Tradition says that ashallot vinaigrettebrings out the best in mâche, though it pairs well with any simple, light salad dressing. Eat mâche alone or in combination with other greens.

Microgreens

What It's Like: Microgreens are not one specific type of green but rather a size of green. Picked just beyond the sprout stage, when the baby plant has developed two true leaves, microgreens can be arugula, cilantro, chard, beets, basil, radish, kale, amaranth, and more.

The flavor of microgreens varies depending on which kind of green it is. However, the flavor is usually very mild. Arugula microgreens, for example, will have some of arugula's peppery bite, but only a fraction of that of the mature plant.

Where To Buy It: Microgreens are an expensive specialty item that can be found at some natural foods grocery stores. If you love microgreens, you might consider growing them at home.

How To Use It: Microgreens are commonly used as a pretty garnish, but they can be added to nearly any salad or piled on top of sandwiches for a pleasant crunch and mild flavor.

Chrysanthemum Greens

Also Known As: Shungiku, kikuna

What It's Like: Another member of the aster family (the same family under which lettuces and chicories fall), chrysanthemum greens are beautiful dark green leaves with a feathery appearance and soft texture.

Young chrysanthemum greens are tender and mild, but can become quite bitter and herbal as they mature.

Where To Buy It: While this green is not available at most chain supermarkets, many Asian markets reliably carry it.

How To Use It: Bright and peppery, young and tender chrysanthemum greens are a tasty addition to salads. They need to be young for the best flavor raw; larger, older greens will take on a bitter edge that gets tamed by cooking.

Chrysanthemum is often served as part of Japanese hot pot (shabu shabu) where the leaves are cooked in simmering broth. You may also see it served along with other herbs and vegetables on the plate of garnishes that accompanies Vietnamese soups like pho, bún bò Hue, and Pnom Penh noodle soup.