The Best Fruit Salads Are Savory

There is no such thing as a vegetable, at least not from a biological perspective. What we think of as vegetables are usually fruits with lower sugar contents, roots or leaves. But the main thing that seems to determine a plant part’s vegetable status is how we decide to treat it and eat it.

Roast it with olive oil and Parm? That’s a vegetable. Toss it with a bunch of sugar and bake it into a pie? Clearly a fruit. Salads are where things get tricky. Adding fruit to savory salads—like the Waldorf or our Escarole Salad with Charred Grapes, Apples and Blue Cheese—is not unusual, but taking a savory approach to fruit salads is less common in the States, especially outside of the now ubiquitous combination of watermelon, feta and herbs.

Season your fruit

What’s good for the tomato is good for the peach, so salt your fruit. Salt doesn’t just make things taste salty—it makes things taste like themselves. I grew up salting watermelon and cantaloupe—not only did it make both melons taste sweeter, it heightened the more nuanced flavors so my taste buds could actually detect them. The same applies to fruit salads.

But a “fruit salad” is not just a salad with fruit, it is a salad that is mostly fruit, or things we think of as fruits. (A caprese technically is a fruit salad, as tomatoes are fruits, but no one refers to it as such.) Fruit salads usually are dressed with cloying yogurt-based concoctions, but not ours. Ours are seasoned with salt (and sometimes pepper) and balanced with punchy vinaigrettes, with the sweetness of the fruit highlighted by savory and spicy ingredients.

And we don’t just use salt for seasoning. In our Tomato and Watermelon Salad with Basil and Goat Cheese, we salt the fruits 10 minutes before serving time, letting the moisture drawn out by osmosis drain away in a colander. This keeps the salad from devolving into a watery mess while concentrating the flavors.

Replace the gloppy yogurt dressing with something punchy

Our Chili-Lime Pineapple and Honeydew Salad takes inspiration from vasos de fruta, a Mexican street snack of fresh fruits such as mango and melon and/or crisp “vegetables” such as jicama and cucumber, seasoned with lime and chili and served in cups. In our mix, pineapple provides plenty of acidity and sweet-tart, tropical flavor, while honeydew melon offers a more floral sweetness. Jicama, radish and cucumber bring the crunch that offers contrast to the juicy fruit. Instead of a flavor-and texture-obscuring creamy dressing, we toss it all together with a little olive oil and fresh lime juice to make an in-the-bowl vinaigrette.

But keeping things punchy doesn’t have to mean omitting any and all added sugar. We drizzle a few spoonfuls of agave into our Chili-Lime Melon Salad to balance the smoky, earthy spiciness of Ancho chili powder. In addition to watermelon and honeydew, we include some cool cucumbers which are, technically, also a melon. Fresh mint and a combination of lime juice and zest gives the dish some zing; salty queso fresco and pungent black pepper prevent the sweetness of the agave from veering towards cloying.

Use vegetables intentionally

It’s hard to know whether to classify our Avocado, Pineapple and Arugula Salad with Fresh Chili and Lime as a fruit salad. The pile of arugula makes a strong case for it as a green salad, but there’s a whole pound of pineapple in there, making it the primary ingredient, at least by mass. No matter how you frame it in your mind, this salad is all about balance. It’s based on the Cuban ensalada de aguacate, berro y piña, a dish we first learned about from Cuba-born chef and food historian Maricel Presilla.

In our recipe, we use both lime zest and juice for citrusy notes, plus white vinegar for an extra shot of acidity. Steeping the sliced red onion and grated garlic in the vinegar for a few minutes mellows their bite so their flavors don’t dominate. Chili heat is a nice counterpoint to the sweet-sour pineapple and rich avocado, and arugula grounds the dish with its peppery flavor.

This Jicama and Orange Salad with Queso Fresco is another one that straddles the line between fruit salad and vegetable salad. This cool, refreshing salad combines slices of crisp, slightly sweet and starchy jicama with tangy oranges, along with herbal cilantro, smoky ancho chili powder and salty queso fresco. If the fruit salad pedants give you any flack, just tell them that “vegetables are a construct,” and have them take a bite. Even if they don’t think it counts as a fruit salad, it definitely counts as delicious.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.