Fresh Fruit Salad with Celery-Honey Dressing

Five fresh fruits tossed in a honey-mustard vinaigrette spiked with celery seed. This is Southern entertaining done right. Pineapple chunks, cantaloupe balls, green grapes, strawberries, and blackberries in a bowl, chilled and dressed.

The celery-honey dressing is what sets this apart from every other fruit salad. It’s a blender vinaigrette made with sugar, dry mustard, paprika, salt, honey, lemon juice, and vinegar. Vegetable oil gets drizzled in slowly while the blender runs, emulsifying into a thick, creamy dressing. Grated onion and celery seeds get stirred in at the end.

That combination of sweet honey, tangy vinegar, warm mustard, and earthy celery seed creates a dressing that complements fruit without burying it. It’s savory enough to keep the salad from tasting like dessert.

The dressing makes about 1 ¾ cups, way more than you need for one batch of salad. It stores well in the fridge and works on green salads too.

Kitchen Tips

• Chill the fruit thoroughly before tossing with dressing. Warm fruit wilts quickly under a vinaigrette
• Drizzle the oil slowly into the running blender. Adding it too fast breaks the emulsion and you end up with a thin, separated dressing
• Toss the fruit gently. Berries bruise easily, especially blackberries
• Dress the salad just before serving. The acid in the dressing will soften the fruit if it sits too long

Variations

• Swap the blackberries for blueberries or raspberries depending on what’s in season
• Add sliced kiwi or mango for a more tropical mix
• Use the dressing on a spinach salad with sliced strawberries and pecans