Sugar Is The Secret Fix For Unripe Fruit In Your Fruit Salad

Fruit salads are the perfect summer food and are a healthy snack for everyone in the family. They are also great for road trips, pool days, and cookouts. But what happens when you go to make a fruit salad and some of your fruit isn't quite ripe? One way to fix this problem is by adding sugar to the mixture.

This works because, as fruits ripen, their sugar content increases and causes them to taste sweeter and feel more soft. By adding white granulated sugar to unripened fruits, you can speed up that process and make the fruit taste more ripe. This is also a great way to make a bad batch of fruits — like flavorless watermelon or cantaloupe — taste juicy and delicious. Most of the time, when fruit is tasteless or disappointing, it is because it was picked too early and didn't have time to properly ripen. To solve this problem, just add sugar!

Adding sugar to a fruit salad seems pretty simple, but there are a few ways to go about it that depend on how much of your fruit isn't fully ripe and how sour the flavor is. If all of your fruits are ripe except for one ingredient, separately add sugar to just that one fruit and then let it sit for a few minutes before adding it to the rest of the mix. This gives your unripe fruit time to sweeten and soak up the sugar before it joins the salad, without overwhelming the flavor of the other ingredients.

If most of the fruit for your salad is unripe or not quite sweet enough, feel free to add granulated sugar directly to the bowl along with your other ingredients. Then let the bowl sit on the counter for an hour before eating or refrigerate overnight for a juicy and sweet fruit salad.

With more information available about the harmful effects of added sugar, you may be cutting back on refined sugar consumption in your home and looking for a healthier alternative. If that's the case, you can use plenty of naturally sweet ingredients to sweeten unripe fruit salad. One way to do it is by replacing the sugar with raw honey. Honey, especially in its raw form, contains antioxidants and can potentially help boost gut health, along with other possible health benefits (via Healthline).

Another option that works along similar lines is maple syrup. Real maple syrup made from tree sap contains high levels of natural sugars, but those sugars also come with beneficial minerals that can make it another great option to sweeten unripe fruit, so long as you use it in moderation (via Healthline). Remember that, with maple syrup, a little goes a long way. You may need to use less of it than you would with honey or other sweeteners. You can also add some citrus juice along with maple syrup to help balance out the sweetness with a bit of acidity.