OXO Salad Spinner vs Paper Towels

Wash the lettuce, shake it out over the sink, blot it with a stack of paper towels or an old dish towel, and hope for the best. That was my method for close to a decade before I finally bought a real salad spinner, and it's still the default in most kitchens because it doesn't require buying anything or finding a place to store one more bowl. So which one actually gets you drier, crisper greens with less mess: the OXO Good Grips glass salad spinner or a roll of paper towels? The short answer is that the OXO spinner wins on speed, dryness, and volume once you're washing greens on a regular basis, but the towel method is still the more sensible choice if salad is an occasional thing in your house rather than a weekly habit.

I've used both for years, sometimes in the same week depending on how much lettuce was sitting in the crisper drawer and how much patience I had left after a long day. Neither method is universally right for every kitchen, and I get a little skeptical of any comparison that pretends one option wins on every single point, because that's rarely how kitchen tools actually work. What follows is a plain, row-by-row look at what each method actually does when you're standing at the sink with wet lettuce in your hands, not a sales pitch for the gadget. I'll tell you exactly where paper towels hold their own, because they genuinely do in a few spots.

I remember the exact week I switched. I'd made a big bowl of mixed greens for a Sunday dinner, blotted everything by hand for what felt like fifteen minutes, and the salad still tasted watery because half the leaves hadn't dried all the way through. A few days later I borrowed a neighbor's spinner to wash spinach for a pasta dish, and the difference in how fast and how thoroughly it worked was enough that I went out and bought my own that same week. That's really the whole comparison in miniature: one method that gets the job fully done fast, and one method that mostly gets the job done if you're willing to put in the time.

	OXO Salad Spinner	Paper Towels
Drying a full head of lettuce	One 30 to 45 second pump session gets it dry enough to dress right away	10 to 15 minutes of blotting, shaking, and re-blotting, and it's still a little damp in spots
Upfront cost	One purchase that keeps paying off for years	Nothing to buy, you already own paper towels
Counter and cabinet space	A 6-quart bowl that has to live somewhere in the kitchen	Nothing to store, it folds back into the towel drawer you already have
Washing a small handful of herbs	Overkill, you're filling a full-size bowl for a few sprigs of basil	A couple sheets of towel handles it in seconds
Dressing adherence on the finished salad	Vinaigrette clings evenly because the leaves are genuinely dry	Dressing pools and slides off any leaf that's still holding water
Cleanup after use	Rinse the basket and bowl, no disposable waste generated	A pile of wet paper towels straight into the trash
Risk of anything breaking or wearing out	A glass bowl and plastic gears, so there is something that could eventually crack or strip	Nothing to break, a paper towel is a paper towel
Washing greens for a crowd or big batch cooking	Handles several heads of lettuce back to back with the same amount of effort	Towel count and time both climb fast, gets tedious past one salad's worth

Where the OXO Spinner Wins

Where the OXO spinner earns its keep is speed and consistency, once you're washing greens more than once a week. Sinking a head of romaine or a bag of loose spinach into the basket, giving the pump a handful of good pulls, and having noticeably dry leaves in under a minute changes whether you actually make a salad on a Tuesday night or just reach for something out of a bag instead. I've written a full walkthrough on how I wash and dry greens fast with the spinner if you want the exact routine, but the short version is that the bowl doubles as a serving bowl and, with the lid snapped on, a storage container. Lettuce keeps noticeably longer in the fridge when it isn't sitting in its own moisture, and I've stopped losing half a head of romaine to a slimy bottom layer since I started storing it spun-dry in the bowl with the lid on.

The other place it wins is dressing. A vinaigrette needs a dry surface to cling to, and paper towels almost never get every leaf fully dry, especially in the curled centers of romaine or the ruffled edges of kale. Water left behind dilutes the dressing and makes the whole bowl taste flatter than it should, thinner and watery instead of coating each leaf. When I'm cooking for four or five people and need three or four heads of lettuce washed in one go, the OXO spinner also just scales better. I can spin one batch, dump it into a bigger serving bowl, and start the next load draining while the first one finishes, which isn't really possible with a stack of towels and a colander unless you enjoy standing at the counter blotting for twenty straight minutes.

There's also a texture difference I didn't expect when I first switched over. Centrifugal spinning seems to be gentler on delicate leaves than pressing them between towels, probably because the leaves aren't getting squeezed and rubbed against a rough paper surface. Butter lettuce and baby spinach in particular used to bruise a little from firm blotting, small dark spots that showed up within a day in the fridge. Spun greens have held up noticeably better, staying crisp for closer to a week instead of wilting or bruising by day three the way blotted greens sometimes did for me.

The glass bowl itself is a small but real advantage too. It sits flat on the counter without sliding around the way a lot of lightweight plastic spinners do, and it goes straight into the fridge or onto the table without looking like a piece of kitchen equipment. Guests have mistaken it for a serving bowl more than once, which is a small thing, but it means the tool doesn't have to disappear into a cabinet between uses the way a purely functional gadget usually does.

Where Paper Towels Win

The towel method wins in exactly the situations the spinner is honestly bad at. If I'm making a sandwich and need four leaves of lettuce dry, I'm not hauling out a 6-quart bowl, filling it with water, spinning it, and then washing the whole thing afterward for four leaves. A damp paper towel or a clean dish towel does that job in the time it takes to grab one out of the drawer, and there's nothing to rinse, dry, or find shelf space for once I'm done. Same goes for a handful of parsley or cilantro for a garnish. Pulling out full spinning equipment for a tablespoon of chopped herbs is genuinely more work than the towel method, not less.

Cost and space are real factors too, and I don't think it's fair to pretend otherwise. A spinner is one more object competing for cabinet room in a kitchen that may not have much to spare, and it's a purchase some households genuinely don't need. If salad shows up in your house once or twice a month, paper towels and a colander will serve you fine for years and there's no real reason to spend money on anything else. I know renters and people in small apartment kitchens who have looked at the spinner, looked at their cabinet space, and correctly decided it wasn't worth the trade.

The towel method also has nothing that can crack, strip a gear, or wear out over time. A paper towel is a paper towel, start to finish, no moving parts and nothing to eventually replace. If you're the type of household that goes through a roll of paper towels a week anyway for other kitchen tasks, using a few extra sheets on lettuce isn't really adding a new cost or a new habit, it's just one more use for something you're already buying. And if you're traveling, staying somewhere with a bare-bones kitchen, or cooking somewhere that isn't fully stocked, the towel method works anywhere there's a sink and a roll of paper towels, which the spinner obviously can't claim.

Who Should Buy Which

If salad is part of your regular weekly cooking, if you're feeding more than one or two people, or if soggy dressing has ever talked you out of making a salad you already had the ingredients for, the spinner earns its spot in the cabinet. It's the tool that removes the annoying step rather than the fun one, and that's usually the kind of gadget worth keeping around long term. Anyone who meal preps salads for the week, packs lunches, or cooks for a family will feel the time savings within the first couple of uses, and it tends to stay near the sink instead of getting buried in a cabinet the way a lot of single-use gadgets do.

If you eat salad occasionally, live somewhere with very little kitchen storage, or mostly just need a few herb sprigs or a small handful of greens dry at a time, stick with paper towels. There's no reason to spend money or give up drawer space solving a problem you don't actually run into very often. I still keep a stack of paper towels by the sink for the small jobs even with the spinner sitting right there on the shelf below. The two methods aren't really competing with each other so much as suited to different amounts of lettuce, and knowing which situation you're actually in matters more than which product has the better reviews.

If you're on the fence, the honest test is how often lettuce actually goes bad in your fridge before you get to it. If you're regularly tossing out a half-used head of romaine because washing and drying it felt like too much trouble on a weeknight, that's the spinner talking to you. If lettuce in your house gets used up before it wilts and salad is already a small, occasional part of how you eat, there's genuinely nothing wrong with sticking to what you've got and saving the counter space for something else.