If you already love the trend of adding cheese and jalapenos to fruit salads, then you’ll love these ways to spice up this summery side dish with an African flavor. Here are 10 delicious and unique African fruit salads to spice up your summer picnics.
Greens and Tropical Fruits
This dish is great because, with the savory flavors like mayonnaise, peanuts and lime juice, it can easily be a side dish with a cold chicken salad or deli meats. We love the cool, crisp and romaine lettuce mixed in to temper some of the more intense flavors like the pineapple and mango, and the spinach gives it a great color.
Avocado already has a semi-sweet flavor and the lemon juice and honey in this recipe brings it out even more. But it’s a nice, creamy addition to the more bold flavors here like papaya and guava. The fresh grated coconut gives the salad a great texture and an overall tropical flavor.
This salad has a lot of Moroccan flavors with the super sweet, dry dates and fresh mint. The orange flower water gives a fresh, subtle citrus flavor to the entire salad, and the pinch of cayenne pepper adds a nice spice.
This salad has a lot of great flavors and textures. The hot harissa sauce and seranno chilies add a great kick to the watermelon. The black olives and feta cheese add a nice chunky texture and savory flavors. Finally the almonds give everything a crunch, and the extra-virgin olive oil marries all the flavors together well.
Yogurt is often used in Moroccan recipes to add a cool, creamy flavor to spicy meat and vegetable dishes, and in this fruit salad, it makes everything extra sweet. This is a simple salad of vanilla yogurt, fresh strawberries, apples, banana, oranges and sugar. It’s easy to make.
This is technically a compote, not a salad. It’s served chilled and it makes for a delicious dessert. The base of the compote is cantaloupe, oranges and strawberries, and these are cooked down with sugar, salt, lemon juice and water, and topped with lychee. The lychee becomes extra sweet when heated, and gives a great tropical flavor to the other fruits.
This recipe uses a lot of the fruits and nuts often used to sweeten up Egyptian meat dishes, and combines them into a bold and beautiful cold compote. The dried prunes, raisins, figs and apricots make a gorgeous orange hue, and the almonds, hazelnuts and pine nuts bring down some of the intense syrupy flavor. You combine all ingredients with water and let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours so all the flavors marry, and the fruits soften.
Since watermelon has such a mild flavor, it can take up the strong flavors of cheese nicely. The lettuce, since it’s mildly savory but still crisp, marries the watermelon and cheese and the blueberries give a great texture and added sweetness.
This is another Moroccan recipe that uses the sweet and aromatic orange blossom water. We love the crisp, fresh pomegranate seeds that add a great crunch to every bite, and grating the apples lets every bite have that delightful, Fuji flavor. Finally the walnuts make this a hearty fruit salad, so you could have it for your breakfast and be filled up.
This is a rather traditional African fruit salad, with pineapple, mango, papaya, grapes, bananas and apples, but it’s blended with a creamy sauce of condensed milk, heavy cream and vanilla extract. It makes for a great dessert.