Easy Fruit Salad 

Vanilla Fruit Salad

The BEST Fruit Salad with a hint of vanilla that brings all the juices of the fruit together! It’s an incredibly easy must-have side dish that looks beautiful and tastes like summer. This is always sure to be a crowd favorite for your next backyard BBQ, summer pool party, or family picnic.

{This post contains affiliate links. Please see my full Disclosure Page for details}This post is not sponsored by Jell-O and all opinions are my own.

How to make the BEST fruit salad

To start you’ll need to decide what fresh fruit you want to use. There is no right or wrong way to make this fruit salad. Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever made it the exact same way twice. The secret ingredient that brings the whole salad together is Jell-O vanilla instant pudding. You don’t have to use much of the pudding mix to get all the flavors and juices from the fruit to blend into a delicious fruit salad.

What Fruit Should I Use?

This really is your preference and how much washing and cutting you want to do. Some fruits that can be washed and thrown in like grapes and blueberries are an easy choice to speed up the prep. You’ll also probably want to consider what fruit is in season near you at the time you’re making this. This makes a beautiful summer fruit salad because fresh fruit is in abundance. I like to use a variety of sweet and tart fruits to make a yummy combination.

Ingredients for Easy Vanilla Fruit Salad

• Strawberries – good strawberries will have nice red color, no dark mushy spots, no mold, and check the leaves, make sure they are not wilted.
• Pineapple – to pick a good pineapple give it a smell it should have that sweet pineapple scent. The skin should be turning yellow and you should be able to easily pluck a leaf from the crown.
• Blueberries – Small firm blueberries tend to be sour and large plump blueberries tend to be sweeter.
• Green grapes – should be firm and plump, they should have a nice color and stay intact on the stem.
• Kiwi – to select kiwi give them a gentle squeeze. If it’s hard it will be sour and unripe, but too soft and it will be mushy. You may need to let them ripen a few days to get the desired ripeness.
• Vanilla Jell-O- 5.1 oz box of  instant vanilla pudding mix

Tools For Easy Fruit Prep

• Use a pineapple corer & slicer
• Small ceramic fruit knife
• Large collapsible colander

Serve Vanilla Fruit Salad

When you have all of the fruit washed and chopped place it in a large serving bowl and sprinkle 1-2 Tbsp. of the instant vanilla pudding mix over the fruit. Stir gently to coat the fruit and cover.  Refrigerate for 30 minutes before serving. You may also like Instant Pot corn on the cob & Instant Pot pasta salad for your next get-together.

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