The Best Summer Fruit Salad

Let me introduce you to the fruit salad that everyone will rave about. We call it the triple fruit salad with lemon poppy seed dressing, but everyone else just calls it “The Best Summer Fruit Salad” because, well, it really is. Whenever we bring this to a party or a potluck, it’s always the first thing gone. People can’t resist the winning combination of pineapple, kiwi, and strawberry.

Enjoy more freshness of the summer season with our Summer Peach Salad.

Why Our Recipe

Only three fruits which makes preparation pretty darn easy!
The most delicious simple dressing that lets the fruit shine.

Did anyone else grow up thinking that fruit salad just meant a bunch of different kinds of fruit mixed together in a bowl? There was never any sort of dressing and always way too much cantaloupe! Cantaloupe in a fruit salad just makes everything else taste like cantaloupe. No thanks. This is the perfect blend of our favorite summer fruit topped with an amazing lemon poppy seed dressing. Yum!

Ingredient Notes

An overhead view of the ingredients needed to make a summer fruit salad.

Pineapple: use fresh, of course. Test for ripeness by giving one of the leaves on top a gentle tug. If it comes out easily, your pineapple is ripe and ready to eat.
Strawberries: slice or quarter them. If they are bigger, I slice them. If they are a more normal size, I quarter them. For those occasional tiny strawberries, halvsies is a good option.
Kiwis: I like to cut them in half and then use a spoon to remove the flesh, or you can slice the ends off and use a pairing knife to remove the peel.
Lemon: this is going to brighten up the flavors of your fruit. It’s like a secret weapon for fruit salads.
Sugar: if you can’t handle the sugar, you can substitute with an equal amount of honey. The added sweetness is about balancing the acidity and tartness of the pineapple.
Poppy Seeds: okay, if it looks like ants to you, I’ll let you leave them off. But I love a good poppy seed dressing!

Sugar

Depending on their ripeness, fruits have various levels of natural sugars. When working with acidic fruits like pineapple and strawberries, it’s a common practice to add a sweetener to provide a more balanced flavor. It’s a good idea to taste your fruit before preparing the salad to see if it may be on the sweeter side, or if it is on the more acidic side. Adding sugar or honey to a more acidic pineapple and batch of strawberries will help balance the flavor.

How do I cut a pineapple?

Aren’t sure how to cut a pineapple? I don’t blame you. Those pokey fruits can be a beast. Pineapple cutters seem like a great idea, but pineapples come in all sorts of sizes and their cores are of varying thickness so it doesn’t always work in practice.

Lay the pineapple on its side on a large cutting board. Cut about 1/2 inch off the top and bottom (removing the large green stalk on top).

Stand the pineapple upright. Use a sharp knife to slice that unruly, pokey skin off the sides in slices. Try to leave as much of the flesh intact as possible, but remove all that nasty skin.

The core of the pineapple is usually hard and inedible. Feel around one end of the pineapple to see where that hardness begins. I usually use a dull butter knife to make a little indentation to outline the core. If you are cubing your pineapple simply cut large chunks off, leaving the hard core behind, then slice and dice into cubes. If you are creating rings, you’ll cut slices and remove the core out of each individually.

A bowl of fruit salad with pineapple, kiwi, strawberries, and a poppyseed dressing.

Storage Instructions

Refrigerate leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge. The fruits will start to turn, despite the lemon juice, but we manage to still enjoy this as leftovers for up to three days. Make sure you are not using overripe fruit at the time of making, as the will determine just how long this will last.