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Dessert

Summer Berry Salad with Fresh Mango Sauce

A fruit salad of peaches, nectarines, plums, pears, melon, and berries, topped with a chilled mango-orange sauce.

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Why it works: Mango and peach share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 59 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mango sauce

  1. Process the large mango in a food processor with metal blade until smooth.

  2. Add the orange rind, orange juice, and caster sugar to taste, and process again until very smooth.

  3. Press the mixture through a sieve into a bowl and chill the sauce.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the peaches, then slice and stone the peaches, nectarines, small mango, and plums.

  2. Quarter the pear, remove the core and seeds.

  3. If using melon, slice it thinly and remove the peel.

  4. Place the sliced fruits on a large plate.

  5. Sprinkle the fruits with lemon juice.

  6. Chill, covered with clear film, for up to 3 hours before serving.

Serve

  1. Arrange the sliced fruits on serving plates.

  2. Spoon the berries on top.

  3. Drizzle with a little mango sauce and decorate with mint sprigs.

  4. Serve the remaining sauce separately.

Recipe from the Recipes Wiki (Fandom).

This recipe comes from the Recipes Wiki on Fandom and is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Our formatting and summaries are shared under the same licence.

Steps grouped into stages for easier reading; the method is the source's own.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Mango + peachtop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  2. Peach + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together161 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,632 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Lemon + minttop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Mango + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mango
Its pulp becomes a smooth, sweet, aromatic base for the sauce.
Caster sugar
Adds sweetness to the sauce, balancing the tartness of the citrus.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and citrus aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit and helps slow browning of cut flesh.

The step that matters

Pressing the sauce through a sieve. Sieving removes fibres and bits of pulp, giving the sauce a smooth, silky texture that suits a thin drizzle over the fruit.

Flavor stand-ins for the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mango, orange, sugar, peach, plum, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  2. Gingerbetter flavor fit
  3. Peppermintbetter flavor fit
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mango, orange, sugar, peach, plum, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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