“Pretty, pretty, pretty”, your fruit salad? Only if you don’t make this fatal – and yet recurring – mistake…
Preparing a fruit salad, some will say, is like buttering a piece of toast: absolutely impossible. Picking a few ripe specimens from your basket, quickly cutting them into cubes or slices, and putting together your little hodgepodge in a large bowl or salad bowl, you don’t really see what could be a problem. Except that when you are an aesthete coupled with a gourmet, you quickly understand that this little game, with apparently so simple rules, turns out to be much more subtle than it seems.
Remember, haven’t you already experienced a certain frustration while contemplating or tasting your vitamin cocktail at dessert time? Colors that you hoped would be vibrant, and ultimately very pale, for lack of having punctuated your monochrome apple-pear-banana trio with a few red fruits? A slightly rough size, which disrupted the visual harmony of your masterpiece? Too much sweetness in the mouth, which you unintentionally accentuated by adding that damn packet of vanilla sugar? A lack of relief, due to not having included a well-chosen spice or a fresh herb to enhance the flavors? Easy, easy… Not so much, in the end.
And the difficulties don’t stop there. There remains an even more insidious trap, into which we all fall – except perhaps cooks keen on biochemistry. A trap which this time concerns the texture of our fruit salads. Have you noticed its annoying tendency to soften at high speed, especially when you prepare it too far in advance? Well, imagine that the culprit is most likely hiding among the protagonists in your salad bowl. Yes yes…
It turns out that kiwi contains a specific enzyme called actinidin, which has the property of breaking down food proteins. The problem is that she also unceremoniously attacks all the kiwi’s poor bowl companions who come into contact… to make them limp. Without resistance, without defense, and above all without chewing in the teeth.
Should we then simply exclude kiwi from our fruity mixes? Fortunately no: just add it at the very last moment to retain a little more crunch. Note that certain tropical fruits, such as banana, papaya, mango or pineapple also contain a certain proportion of actinidine. The most meticulous will therefore apply the same precaution with these charming (but not very sociable) exotic fruits.
