Celebrate summer with a big, chaotic fruit salad

What a wonderful time of the year to have a mouth! I visited the Santa Monica farmers market on a recent Wednesday and found its stalls stocked with the fruit of early summer: peaches, nectarines, berries, grapes, cherries, melons, oh my!

If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to go to your local farmers market, now is the time.

The abundance of produce was so striking, I immediately decided that my first official recipe for the Los Angeles Times would be: FRUIT SALAD.

I love fruit salad. Every New Year’s Eve, a few dear friends and I take a trip to Death Valley, and my friend Eli inevitably makes a huge, chaotic batch of winter fruit salad (with mandarins, Oro Blanco segments, passionfruit goo and a few curveball additions … ), slops it into a gallon Ziploc bag and packs it away for us to take on a long hike. At the top of the trek, when we’re all dazed and scrambled, we pass around the bag, each taking turns spooning out colorful, rejuvenating mouthfuls.

Gazing down into the bag, you’re met with such an unusual sight — myriad shapes, shreds and unrecognizable bits hued in different shades of sunshine — that it’s almost hard to look at. The experience of eating it is even more shocking … the electric crunch of passionfruit seeds giving way to exploding citrus vesicles, glimmering like wayward teardrop gems … and … was that a dehydrated banana?

There’s a time and a place for a restrained, composed fruit salad, and there is, of course, much beauty in a single, perfect piece of fruit. However, I love a chaotic fruit salad. I like not knowing what exactly I’m eating with each vibrant bite — it inspires in me some titillating mix of horror and an inability to stop eating.

To me, fruit salad should be a fun, nourishing, low-pressure and high-reward celebration of the moment’s produce. In December, citrus and passionfruit make sense because those fruits are in season. In the spring, you might use mostly berries, some early cherries and some lingering winter citrus. In the fall, it might feature figs, pears and persimmons. I made my fruit salad in mid-June, so it showcased everything that was in season and delicious on that particular day at the farmers market: strawberries, raspberries, golden raspberries, two types of melon, mango, grapes, cherries, nectarine and peach. Allow your fruit salad to be a snapshot of the season’s bounty. The process of making fruit salad is pretty straightforward:

1. Pick out the best in-season fruit you can find and afford.
2. Wash, prep and cut the fruit so that it is interesting and easy to eat.
3. Mix it all together, perhaps splashing in some fruit juice to tie it all together, chill and enjoy.
   

Easy enough, but of course, we can always go deeper!

Here are a few principles I try to keep in mind that could be helpful for you:

Follow that old adage, “What grows together, goes together.” Trust that any ripe piece of in-season fruit will be at home in your fruit salad. While “the more the merrier” philosophy works for me, a simple salad of berries and stone fruit (or of two varieties of the same fruit) could be a lovely way to highlight the complements and contrasts of each.

Consider the shape, size and appearance of each ingredient. I like keeping the eater engaged by finding unexpected and unrecognizable ways to process the fruit. With this batch, I peeled long, thin, noodle-like sheets of melon out with a spoon and cut my pitted cherries into thick, doughnut-shaped slices. You don’t want your fruit salad to be too difficult to eat, however, so make sure everything is bite-sized.

Like the perfect peach, your fruit salad should dance between acidity and sweetness. You can find this balance through the fruit you use (using a tart variety of grapes if the cherries are sweet but lacking acid), or by adding a sweetener (like sugar, honey, agave, maple syrup, brown sugar, cane syrup, etc.) or an acidifier (like lemon or lime juice).

Textural variety helps keep your fruit salad interesting and surprising. Consider pairing yielding fruits like nectarines with crisper specimens like apples, even softer fruits like bananas or cherimoya or crunchier additions like passionfruit pulp or shreds of coconut. Personally, I like nuts and dried fruit in my fruit salad — IS THAT GOING TO BE A PROBLEM? — so, I tossed in a handful of chopped fruit and nut mix from the farmers market. After soaking in the salad for a while, the raisins plumped and swelled, adding a yielding explosivity.

I like my fruit salad to be bathed in a bright, flavorful liquid. This time, I added some tangerine juice, but in the future I might try to find a more summery option (like watermelon juice), or add a bit of sugar to coax more of the natural juices out of the fruit I was using. With the added liquid, my final product perhaps ended up a little closer (visually) to childhood’s canned fruit cocktail (though I recently learned the USDA restrictions on canned fruit cocktail are surprisingly specific), but it will always be fruit salad to me.

There is much room for customization here. Treat it as an exercise to let loose and customize to your own desires. Soft herbs, spices, liquors, nuts, dairy, dried fruits, olive oil, a pinch of salt, all sorts of sweeteners, acidifiers and more are welcome in the fruit salad bowl — it is up to you. Taste, think and adjust.

If you’re making enough to have leftovers (which I encourage you to), it’s worth considering how certain fruits change over time. (For example, bananas get a bit gooshy after sitting around for a while.) It’s also helpful to think ahead to what you might do with your leftovers. If you want to make popsicles or an agua fresca, you might not need to do anything differently, but if you’re going to bake your leftovers into something like a crisp or a crumble (more on this soon, wink, wink), you might want to exclude fruits that wouldn’t bake well (like melon and, to a lesser extent, mango).

Well, those are some thoughts to get you started on your fruit salad.

If you somehow need more inspiration, I heartily recommend listening to the song “Fruit Salad” by the Wiggles. You can find the recipe for my particular fruit salad here, and I hope you’ll use it as a jumping-off point to make your own, based on whatever in-season produce you have access to. That’s all for now — I’ll be back next week to show you how to save your leftover fruit salad from the compost, and instead turn it into a lovely summer crisp.

More soon,
Cody

P.S. I made a few videos this week to go along with this newsletter. I’m finishing up a fruit salad video right now, and in the meantime, you can watch me visit the farmers market and figure out how to pit cherries without a cherry pitter.