Winter Fruit Salad

This Winter Fruit Salad is a great way to eat fresh fruit during the colder months. It makes a healthy addition to any Christmas, New Year’s or other holiday gathering.

Fruit salad is one of my favorite fresh and healthy side dishes/desserts/snacks/fix for anything. It can be hard to eat enough fresh fruit during winter, but with this fruit salad? You’ll eat tons.

If you’re looking for an easy way to get your kids to eat fresh fruit during the winter, this is it. And it’s so simple to make!

Ingredients you’ll need

Here is a visual overview of the ingredients in the recipe. Scroll down to the printable recipe card at the bottom of this post for quantities!

Ingredient notes

• Honey: I recommend using a runny honey with a mild taste. Maple syrup is a good substitute if you don’t want to use honey.
• Poppy seeds: If you’re not a fan, just leave them out! The salad tastes delicious without the poppy seeds, too.
• Fruit: Feel free to leave out any fruit you don’t enjoy. You can increase a different kind of fruit in its place, or use another winter fruit you enjoy. If you want to add banana, please make sure to only slice and add it as you’re serving the salad – otherwise it will turn mushy and brown.
• Dressing: I go for a very simplified dressing here, it’s enough for me in this salad with so many different kinds of fresh fruit. If you want something with a little more zing, go for my Poppy Seed Fruit Salad Dressing with lemon juice.
• Do not add dairy: If you want to use a different dressing entirely, feel free. But do not add anything dairy-based to this fruit salad – fresh kiwi fruit reacts with dairy products and yields a very bitter, metallic taste. Not pleasant! So steer clear from any yogurt, cream or pudding based dressings here.

How to make a Winter Fruit Salad

Start by cutting up all the fruit. I’ll admit, it takes a little while to prep it all. Feel free to go for canned where you can, if you need to save a little time.

Next, add the salad dressing ingredients to a small bowl or measuring jug and whisk to combine.

Now just add your fruit to a large salad bowl, toss with the dressing and serve!

Recipe tips

Hold the sugar. It really doesn’t need it. Way back in the 90ies it may have been cool to add two cups of sugar to a fruit salad (no, really, I made these kinds of fruit salads) – but not in 2020.

Of course it all depends on the tartness of your fruit, but be gentle on the sweetener and let the fruit shine. You can always add sugar, but you can’t take it away if there’s too much.

Don’t add mushy fruit. You may be surprised to find there’s no banana in this salad – but apart from the fact that I’m no raw banana lover (gimme all the banana bread, but not raw please), they just really don’t do anything in a fruit salad for me. They turn brown really fast, they turn mushy and mushy banana makes everything taste terrible.

Otherwise, you also need to pay attention to use a really firm pear. They’re usually the small green ones. Don’t go for the large brownish ones for a salad – they just fall apart and turn the salad into a mess.

Be careful with the pomegranate. If you don’t want to end up with an all-red salad, you need to be careful with the pomegranate.

There are two options: Either you can just sprinkle the arils on top. Or, this is the way for patient people, you can rinse and dry them very carefully. It’s best to let them mostly air-dry, so if you want to go this route do this before you prep any other fruit.

Add them after you’ve mixed all the other fruit with the dressing and just toss them in slightly.

Other than that, there’s really not much to say about this – chop, dress, toss. That’s about all the remaining instructions you’ll need for this fruit salad.

More fruit salad recipes

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Printable recipe