This week, I tested a tropical fruit salad recipe from Martha Stewart.

This tropical fruit salad is simple, delicious, and distinctive enough that your guests will go on and on about it. You can find Martha’s recipe here, but read on, and I’ll give you tips on it.

It’s beautiful. It’s not as though you haven’t seen a plate of fruit before, but the zest and coconut dress it up. The lime not only looks nice, but pairs beautifully with the pineapple and magically sweetens up the strawberries.

You can see Sarah Carey make this salad in a video, here.

Here are my notes on the video:

• When prepping a pineapple, I’m always stuck in a battle between trimming away too much pineapple flesh, and getting rid of those thorny little eyes. Truth is, if you make your slice deep enough to rid yourself of the eyes, you’ll wind up with plenty of pineapple. Sarah has a “pineapple water” idea (see the video) that makes me feel like I’m not wasting the pineapple I’m shaving away.
• Sarah slices up her pineapple once it’s quartered, but I think that you might want to split the quarters into eighths before slicing, depending on the size of your pineapple and your taste for cramming large things in your pie hole.
• I agree with her about not composing the salad until the last minute, not just because of the unsightly red stain, but also because the lime will eventually soak into the fruit and infuse with it, and I think the salad is more interesting before that happens fully.

Tropical Fruit Salad Recipe

Recipe Modifications:

• I wasn’t crazy about the mint leaves called for in the original recipe. Rather than have occasional bursts of intense mint, I’d rather it were more subdued and distributed. So I used dried mint. (You could use minced fresh mint if you want to distribute the flavor without subduing it.) You can toss the dried mint with the strawberries before adding them to the salad, to allow the strawberries to rehydrate the mint to some extent, if you want.
• Coconut chips are definitely what you want in this salad. You can get away with shredded, but the salad will look much less expensive.

What You Need to Serve 4:

1 lb strawberries, sliced
Zest from 1 lime, plus 1-2 Tbs juice
1 Tbs dried mint
1 pineapple, cut into chunks
¼ cup coconut chips, toasted

How to Do It:

Start your prep with the strawberries. Optionally, toss them with the mint and set them aside while you attack the pineapple. Build layers: pineapple, strawberries, zest (and mint), juice, coconut.

(For the original directions and the video, see Martha Stewart.)

Notes:

You’ll be more successful if you…

• Resist the idea of picking up pre-prepped fruit from a salad bar or whatnot. It’s rarely as delicious as whole fruits that you prep yourself. If you know that you have a reliably fantastic source, though, it could be a nice time-saver.
• The original recipe calls for 2 Tbs of juice, but in the video, Sarah asks for 1 Tbs. I recommend starting with less and increasing to taste.

What to do with leftovers:

• Turn any leftover salad into a crisp. It’s amazing. In fact, it’d be worth making a ton extra so that you’ll be sure to have some leftover. That’s how much you’re going to like the crisp.
• OR, freeze it and use it in a smoothie.

The Verdict

This is a fantastic recipe, Martha (Sarah). (5 / 5)

Tropical Fruit Salad

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This content was not written in exchange for anything, nor was it solicited. Yeah, OK … so strawberries aren’t tropical. But they’re also not berries, so…

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