Easy Fresh Fruit Salad – Spend With Pennies

This easy recipe for fruit salad is full of fresh fruit all tossed in a simple vanilla kissed fruit salad dressing!

Add your summer favorites for the perfect healthy snack, side dish, or even dessert.

The Best Fruit Salad

• This light salad is low in calories but filled with energizing vitamins and antioxidants.
• Perfect for serving next to waffles, pancakes, or ice cream!
• Can be made ahead of time and chilled until it’s ready to serve.
• So versatile with add-ins, make a signature salad with any fruit in the fridge!

What Goes in a Fruit Salad?

Lots of color, texture and of course amazing fresh flavor makes fruit salad so delicious! This recipe has a combination of berries, some citrus, grapes, and kiwi fruit. But any combination of fruit will work.

Other fruit salad options:

• Apples – toss in citrus juice to keep from browning
• Bananas – toss in citrus juice, add just before serving
• Berries of any kind – softer berries can be added just before serving, larger berries like strawberries should be sliced
• Melon – watermelon, honeydew or cantaloupe are great in salads. Esnure your watermelon is seedless
• Grapefruit or Oranges – fresh or canned work, if using fresh, we like to supreme the citrus.
• Grapes – cut in half
• Kiwi – peel and chop
• Peaches – toss in citrus to keep from browning, canned works well even with fresh fruit
• Pineapple or Mango – cut into bite sized pieces, canned works well even with fresh fruit

Prepping Fruit for Salad

Most fruit can be cut into bite-sized pieces. Here are a few other tips for a great fruit salad.

• COLOR Blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries should stay whole so their juice doesn’t color the salad.
• BROWNING Toss banana and chopped apple with lime or lemon juice so they don’t oxidize (turn brown).
• SOFT FRUITS Fragile fruits (like bananas and raspberries) can be sprinkled on top after mixing the others so they don’t break.

Fruit Salad Dressing

This fruit salad uses a very light simple syrup style dressing. We love it because it doesn’t mask the flavors of the fruit and you can add a little or a lot.

You can swap out the dressing for any dressing you like (or even leave it off if you’d prefer). 

• Try a vanilla pudding dressing.
• For a citrusy twist, add a bit of honey and orange juice.
• Vanilla yogurt can be stirred in for a creamy fruit salad that has fewer calories and sugar.
• Stir in whipped cream or cool whip and some mini marshmallows.

How to Make Fruit Salad

1. Make the vanilla dressing and let it cool to room temperature.
2. Prepare pineapple, strawberries, & kiwi and put them in a large bowl. Add a squirt of lemon juice and toss to keep the fruit from browning.
3. Add remaining of the fruit and very gently toss with some of the vanilla syrup. You may not need all of the syrup.
4. Serve immediately or cover & keep chilled. Chop up some fresh mint to garnish the salad if desired.

Leftovers

• Leftover fruit salad will keep for about a day in the refrigerator but there are so many ways to use it up!
• Leftover cinnamon-flavored simple syrup can also be added to drinks! Try adding it to Sangria.
• For best results, serve fruit salad fresh, within 24 hours.
• If you have extras you can’t eat, drain the fruit well and place it on a parchment-lined pan, and freeze. Once frozen, place in a freezer bag. Frozen fruit can be used to make smoothies or smoothie bowls.

More Fresh Fruit Faves

Did you make this Fruit Salad? Let us know what your favorite additions are in the comments below!