Fruit Salad

Steps

1. slice12 min
   everything cut to roughly 3/4 inch, firm fruit first
   pineapple + mango + melon + grapes + kiwi, cut to one consistent size into a wide bowl. Uniform pieces are not a cosmetic preference: unequal pieces mean unequal spoonfuls, and a bowl where the pineapple is thumb-sized and the grape is whole eats as separate fruits rather than as a salad. Cut the firm, dry-surfaced fruit first and the wet or fragile fruit last so the board is not swimming when you get to the berries
2. whisk2 min
   in a small bowl, honey fully dissolved
   lime juice + the juice caught while segmenting the orange + honey + a pinch of salt, whisked until the honey is gone rather than sitting in a thread at the bottom = dressing. Honey dropped straight onto cold fruit stays a stripe of honey. The salt is the least obvious ingredient here and the one that does the most work: without it the sweetness reads flat and watery, and the acid tastes like sourness rather than brightness
3. mix3 min
   firm fruit only, two or three folds
   cut firm fruit + about two-thirds of the dressing, turned over gently with a wide spoon or your hands. Add the dressing in stages and stop while there is still some in the bowl — you can always add more, and you cannot take back a fruit salad sitting in syrup. Every stir bruises soft flesh and pulls juice out, which is why this is folded three times and not stirred smooth
4. season2 min
   taste before adding anything else
   the dressed fruit, tasted from the bowl and corrected — more lime if it reads dull, the last of the dressing if it reads dry, and nothing at all if the fruit is genuinely ripe. This is the step the sources are unanimous about and home cooks skip: sweetener is an adjustment to this particular fruit on this particular day, not a fixed quantity. Sugaring peak-season fruit by the recipe is how good produce ends up tasting like canned
5. top1 min
   within minutes of serving
   strawberries + blueberries + orange segments scattered over, with raspberries, banana and torn mint held back until the bowl is on the table. Fragile fruit goes in last because it is structural, not decorative — berries at the bottom of a tossed bowl are crushed by the pineapple above them, and banana browns in minutes once cut. Dressed salad holds a few hours refrigerated and is best inside a day or two; after that the soft fruit has given up its water and the whole bowl is sitting in juice