Summer Fruit Salad, the Best Fruit is All Red

Summer Red Fruit Salad features the season's freshest fruit like strawberries, cherries, watermelon, and plums, and it just so happens they're all red! Relying primarily on the natural sweetness of the fruit and a touch of tartness from lime and ginger in the dressing, it's the light, bright recipe that's perfect as a palate cleanser between rich grilled meats at backyard barbecues, a refreshing snack at picnics, or an easy healthy dessert. You can even add it to green salads and yogurt bowls! Shall we?

_{post updated June 2006, originally published August 2007}

Explore More

• What Ingredients You Need for Summer Red Fruit Salad
• What are the Best Fruits for Summer Fruit Salad
• How to Prep Fruit for Fruit Salad
• How to Make Fruit Salad Actually Better
• Summer Red Fruit Salad Recipe

What Ingredients You Need for Summer Red Fruit Salad

For Summer Red Fruit Salad:

• Strawberries, 1 pound, hulled and quartered lengthwise
• Cherries, 1 pound, pitted and halved
• Plums, 1 pound, cut into ¾- to 1-inch size pieces
• Watermelon, 1 pound of ¾- 1-inch cubes
• Fresh mint and/or basil leaves, optional for garnish

For dressing:

• Limes, 2 juiced and zested
• Maple syrup, 2 tablespoons
• fresh Ginger, 1 teaspoon grated
• Sea salt, 2 large pinches

HIGHLY recommended that you double the recipe and serve it for your BBQ, brunch, or dinner. Then, refrigerate the rest and serve it the next few days as breakfast with a dollop of yogurt, on a bowl chia seed pudding, as a light snack by itself, or even tossed with regular greens for a fruit-forward salad.

And what's stopping you from tossing a 2-3 cups of the finished Fruit Salad into the blender with a splash of ice cold coconut milk or yogurt and making a highly drinkable, healthy smoothie? Nothing, my friend, nothing's stopping you.

What are the Best Fruits for Summer Fruit Salad

With the exception of raspberries because they're too fragile, all fruits that are in season in summer are great for a colorful fruit salad! But if you've ever dumped a bag of Skittles or Starburst into your hand, you already know the truth: everyone reaches for the red ones first because they're just the best.

That's exactly the inspiration behind this Summer Fruit Salad that features everyone's favorites: strawberries, cherries, plums or pluots (shoutout to the dinosaur egg pluots that are dappled green and pink on the outside and bright red on the inside!), and watermelon. Not only are they all red, but each one brings a different taste and texture that create a balance in the final dish. Strawberries are sweet-tart, deep red cherries are sweet and soft, plums and pluots are tart, and watermelon is crisp and refreshing.

But don't think you can't make this salad if you don't have the exact fruits. Make the gingery, lime-y dressing and toss with a total of 4 pounds total of 3-5 different kinds of fruit. It won't have the same visual impact as all red, but it'll taste just as good!

Other Summer Fruits for Salad (Not Red)

Nectarines and Peaches. Either or both nectarines or peaches are great, as long as they are a little more firm/crisp rather than soft/juicy. I tend to lean toward nectarines in general because they're a little more tart than peaches, and I like to leave the skins on.

Blackberries and Blueberries. These are easy to add because you just wash and go. Notably absent from this list are raspberries, which are just too fragile and don't hold their shape in a salad format.

Cantaloupe, Honeydew, and Other Melons. Always a classic for summer, melons are are perfectly fine for a fruit salad. Just make sure to chop them into small cubes. If you want to go the distance, use a small melon baller, or even mini cutout shapes!

Grapes. I personally prefer eating grapes directly out of hand rather than in a salad, but I am including them here because if you can find super "snappy" red grapes, they do add a great texture to the salad. Halve each grape length-wise to keep the size small, and to keep them from rolling around all over the place.

Really Good Extras for Fruit Salad

Different Fruit. You can substitute any fruit for another in the same amount, or include fruit that happens to be in season and catches your eye at the market. If it's early enough or very late in the summer season, you might get lucky and even find figs!

Pepitas, Nuts, and Other Seeds. I've added pepitas to this Summer Red Fruit Salad before (seeds because we have a tree nut allergy in our family). However, roasted pistachios, sliced almonds, toasted pecans or walnuts are also great options! But let's be honest, if you don't add seeds or nuts, no one will miss them.

How to Prep Fruit for Fruit Salad

How to Make Fruit Salad Actually Better

Cut Fruit Into Small Dice. To make the Summer Red Fruit Salad the easiest to eat, cut the fruit into the smallest uniform pieces you can that will fit into a spoon.

You Can Cut the Fruit Bigger to Make it Pretty. To make the Summer Red Fruit Salad more visually interesting, leave the fruit in larger pieces that show off their natural shapes like halved cherries.

Garnish with Fresh Mint. Fresh mint is available year-round at the grocery store, and will add a brightness and color to the salad.

Best Summer Fruit Recipes

Food for Afterthoughts

In a valiant effort to put a somewhat perceptible dent in the massive backlog of photos and notes on my hard drive, today begins a weeklong lightning storm of posts. I am, of course, very braveheartedly attempting to do this during a time when newborn babies are wailing in the background, work-work is pressurizing my bodily carbon into Delicious diamonds, and my normally dormant blogger's social life has inopportunely decided to explode like a disco bomb into a million shimmering rocks drowning in Citron and soda.

In other words, every single thing in my life is screaming to be made Priority One.

Priority!!!

*pause for emPHAsis*

One!!!

*pause for breath*

Everyone has these things called "priorities." Everyone has the same basic list of high-level priorities. Everyone does this activity of "setting priorities," whether they think they do or don't. Whether they think they do because they have written priorities down in descending order on the About page of their blogs or they think they don't - but, oh, they do - because every night at 8 PM when their desks still have fourteen files they choose to go home and have dinner with their families, everyone sets priorities because "priorities" is what we have learned. Either sometime during our senior year career counseling, we were brainwashed by 7th-year seniors into believing that the skill of prioritization is highly desirable, and therefore marketable to prestigious companies offering high-paying salaries, or sometime during that career of a long-line of increasingly higher-paying jobs, we were brainwashed by equally highly-paid "life consultants" into believing that we have to put the big rocks into the life jar first and all the smaller pebbles will fill in the gaps accordingly.

Everyone does this master-level skill-requiring activity of setting priorities differently, both in terms of actual tactical method and in terms of the resulting madness, which means priorities are so totally subjectively subjective that I have to ask "What is the point?"

What is the point of setting priorities? What is the point if everyone else seems to have utter disregard for my remarkable spreadsheet representation of life priorities, accurately stack-ranked based on weighted averages of two variables u and i and where u=urgency, i.e. how badly you need it from me, and i=importance, i.e. how much I care about it?!?!

What is the point?!?!

When taken at the Executive Summary level, my family has always been, still remains, and will forever be, Priority One. However, when we granularize "life" into weeks, days, hours, and if you're a freak like me, 15-minute increments, daily tasks associated with family, while eternally, unequivocally the most important, (i=10), appear to be less urgent (u=2). Daily calls with my sisters become one-line emails. I put off calling Mom and Dad until Thursday. I show up a little bit late to Sunday dinner because I was knee-deep in…work.

Work, on the other hand, alternates between Two and Three. However, regardless of its stack-ranked order on the Priorities tab of my Life.xls, work is always urgent. Part of that urgency, of course, comes from the nature of the industry. The Internet is open 24 hours and moves at the speed of superheroes. Disregarding the industry though, work always seems urgent because it's time-based and more importantly, there are no other options. There are no other options. I have to heave myself out of bed every morning at an obscene hour. I have to do the first of what will be infinite rounds of email sweeps before 7 AM. I have to make myself presentable to the small piece of the public that is my team. (I don't have to shower, though. I'm Asian.) I have to commute, have to sit at my miserable little desk in my cramped little office, have to churn out deliverables because...I have no other option.

Unless of course, I could realistically fund my Delicious diamond life with funemployment checks and the $20 I make every month from Google(non)Sense.

Work has multiplied above stressfully urgent and beyond critically important, but since family will never be ousted from the number one spot on my list of priorities, something else has got to give. That something, very woefully, is food because eating is the only thing over which I have enough control to counterbalance the exponential increase in everything else. That which was never rated in either importance or urgency because it was simply understood as the foundation of a delicious lifestyle, has driven me to speed. Not the drug. Speed, a method for controlled sustenance.

Once again, I have gone the way of Black and Blue. Or in this seasonal case, red and raw.

At what is quite possibly the most important nutritive meal of the day because I don't have time to eat lunch or dinner the rest of the day, I barely have time to forage through a badly overgrown pantry for a flake of six-months stale cereal, let alone sit down at the table to eat it out of a bowl with a spoon. All those other priorities in my life have reduced breakfast to some unmeasured amount of suspiciously runny yogurt that's likely too much because I'm on the phone when I'm pouring it into the blender directly from the bulk container, pomegranate juice that splashes onto the counter right next to the circle of dried juice that I didn't have time to wipe up yesterday, and a handful of frozen cherries from a bag that's still open in the freezer because I didn't close it carefully enough the day before. In 45 seconds, I'm sprinting out the door, cursing because I just wasted 45 seconds making a smoothie.

And yet.

Oh, and yet.

Where do you think I got those frozen cherries?

Not two days before, I spent two hours on my balcony in the shade of an enormous tree with three bowls on a tray on my lap. For two hours, I pitted fresh cherries. No machine. No unijobber from the wall of kitchen gadgets at Bed, Bath and Beyond. No, for two hours, I painstakingly pitted cherries by hand. Wielding a very small, but deceptively powerful for its size, paring knife, I sliced a ring into the cherry around its pit, ripped the fleshy halves apart, and let them weep their ripe, red blood right into my hands.

Two hours. No spreadsheets. No project plans. No email. No "priorities."

It was my most productive two hours in a very long time.