A rainbow of finely chopped fruits lightly dressed with lime, honey and mint is what turns an everyday snack into a perfect bite fruit salad.

Some people write off fruit salad as nothing more than a bowl of mixed fruit, but there is an art to blending the right combination of different sizes, shapes, flavors and textures to create the perfect bite of fruit salad. When I was younger, the ideal fruit salad was crafted by balling three different kinds of melon and tossing it with enough sugar to create a thick syrup. While I still think melon balls (and melon recipes) are delightful, I’m grateful for the ever-changing and ever-growing variety of available fruits—and the fact that I’ve gotten more creative with how I chop the fruit.

Bites of typical fruit salads often require skewering one piece of fruit on your fork at a time, but if you cut all the fruits into equally sized, small pieces (just as you would a chopped salad), you can get a bit of everything in every bite. We share a recipe for perfect bite fruit salad here, but you can apply this chopping method to any of your favorite spring or summer fruit salads.

SARAH TRAMONTE FOR TASTE OF HOME

Ingredients for Perfect Bite Fruit Salad

• Strawberries: Although the leaves on the top of a strawberry are edible, you probably don’t want them in this salad. Hull a strawberry in a way that removes the leaves with the top of the core. To keep them fresh as long as possible, store strawberries in the original plastic clamshell or in the crisper drawer in the fridge.
• Blueberries: Whether you get blueberries from a farm stand or supermarket, pick the best blueberries by looking for ones that are plump with firm skin and an even, deep purple-blue color.
• Granny Smith apples: Granny Smith apples are crisp and slightly tart. Combined with other sweet fruits, as in this perfect bite fruit salad recipe, the apples balance the various flavor notes. Granny Smith are also one of the best apples for apple pie.
• Seedless watermelon: To ensure the most flavor from your watermelon, make sure you know how to tell if your watermelon is ripe, whether you figure that from the heft of the melon or the tell-tale yellow patch on the skin.
• Mangoes: Learning how to cut a mango is a little different from cutting other fruits because of a mango’s large, long oval pit in the middle—but it’s pretty easy once you do it for the first time. A ripe mango will yield to gentle pressure when pressed, similar to a peach or pear, but avoid any mangoes that are squishy, as they will be too soft to dice.
• Dressing: A simple mixture of lime juice, honey and minced fresh mint coats the fruit to coax out the natural juices and offer a sweet-tart flavor. This recipe offers a range in the amount of honey to use because even perfectly ripe fruit can vary in sweetness.

Taste of Home