Bernard in Indianapolis says, “I have a salad recipe that calls for a large head of lettuce washed and torn into bite-sized pieces, and a head of cauliflower washed and cut into bite-sized pieces. I am multiplying the recipe by 10, so I am going to use bags of ready to eat lettuce and cauliflower. How much lettuce and cauliflower is in a head?”

Cauliflower by Indio goat, Flickr

Short answer: short of ‘eyeballing’ it, or buying one and a half bags of lettuce for every head (15/10), there is no short answer. Leaf lettuce is thought generally to weigh about a pound per head, however, and iceberg lettuce, being mostly water, certainly weighs a bit more. Cauliflower is also heavier.

Basic volume yield for “heads” is just over 6 cups of torn pieces for lettuce, while cauliflower will get you 3 cups of chopped florets. But I would suggest weighing a large head of lettuce in your grocer’s produce department and then looking at the weight of the prepackaged lettuce. It may require a little math, as many packages of lettuce are 10 or 12 ounces (there are 16 ounces in a pound). If 10-12 heads of lettuce seems about accurate for your large salad, then 13-16 twelve-ouncers will compare, or 16-20 ten-ouncers.

Cauliflower often comes in one- or two-pound packages, and it is all edible, as the stalk has already been removed. There should be an easy correlation between packaged and bulk cauliflower. If 10 heads completes your recipe, then 9 one-pound packages ought to do the trick.

Buying prepackaged produce is an excellent idea when working with large quantities and under time constraints, especially if help is limited. It is a little bit more expensive, but what you paying for is essentially for the produce company to act as your sous chef and do some of the work for you.