Hearts of Palm Salad features sliced hearts of palm, creamy avocado, and sweet-tart pink grapefruit. Delicious, healthy, easy, and elegant!
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Why Make This Recipe?
- Delicious flavor and texture combination of the sweet-tart grapefruit, creamy avocado, and crisp, vegetal hearts of palm
- So quick to make
- Perfect as a side salad or add a protein for a full meal
🥗 Ingredients
- Hearts of palm: We prefer to use whole canned hearts of palm and slice them ourselves, but you can also use the pre-cut hearts of palm.
- Pink grapefruit: You can also make this salad with oranges rather than grapefruit. It will take longer to supreme your oranges, because you will need 4 or 5 to get the same amount of citrus flesh. Also, as oranges are a little sweeter than grapefruits, you may want to add a little lime juice or lemon juice to your salad instead of just orange juice.
- Celery seed: We go back and forth between seasoning with celery seed and with Penzey’s Sunny Paris Seasoning. But feel free to replace with dried herbs of your choosing. Dried oregano, basil, or thyme (or a combination of those) would work.
🥣 Step-by-Step Instructions
For this Hearts of Palm Salad recipe with grapefruit, you’ll learn how to “supreme” a grapefruit. This is a cheffy term for cutting out just the flesh of a citrus fruit. To begin, use a sharp knife to cut off the very top and bottom of the grapefruit rind.
Then, starting at the top, cut around the shape of the grapefruit until you reach the bottom, cutting off the rind and pith but as little of the grapefruit flesh as possible.
Now hold your grapefruit over a bowl and use your knife to cut between each membrane of the grapefruit.
Let the grapefruit sections fall into the bowl.
When you are finished, squeeze the juice out of the remaining grapefruit into a different, small bowl. Repeat with a second grapefruit.
Next, drain and rinse one can of hearts of palm. Pat dry and slice them into ⅓-inch-thick coins. Cut an avocado in half, working around the pit. Slice the half without the pit into cubes, then scoop out of the avocado skin and repeat with the second side.
Combine grapefruit wedges, sliced hearts of palm, and avocado cubes in a mixing bowl.
Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil, ½ teaspoon celery seed, ¼ teaspoon kosher salt, and ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Stir gently. Taste, and add more grapefruit juice from the small bowl if you’d like.
I generally add another 1-2 tablespoons of juice, but it depends how juicy your grapefruit sections in the bowl were already. Add more salt and pepper to taste, and serve!
🧐 Recipe FAQs for Hearts of Palm Salad
Hearts of palm, also known as chonta or swamp cabbage, come from inside the stems of some kinds of palm trees, most often grown in Florida, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Central America.
Harvesting wild hearts of palm, which are mostly single-stemmed palm plants, is not sustainable on a large-scale, since harvesting kills the plant. However, most canned hearts of palm now come from the peach palm plant, which produces multiple stems per plant. Farmer can harvest the stems for their hearts without killing the plant. Yay for sustainable hearts of palm!
Fresh hearts of palm do exist, but they are rare, and don’t keep for very long. Typically, you’ll find hearts of palm canned or jarred in the grocery store, with the other canned vegetables. Some describe the taste of hearts of palm as similar to artichokes, with perhaps a bit more sweetness and savoriness.
If you find fresh hearts of palm rather than canned, you need to peel them before eating. You can then eat them raw, though you can also cook them in boiling water for a minute or two to soften them up a little more. Canned hearts of palm can be eaten as is, with no need to peel or cook.
In terms of nutrition, hearts of palm have some positives and one negative. On the positive side, hearts of palm are a good source of fiber, potassium, vitamin C, calcium, magnesium, iron and several other nutrients. They are also low in cholesterol, calories, and fat. On the negative side, canned hearts of palm are quite high in sodium, so best eaten in moderation.
👩🍳 Expert Tips
The trickiest part of this palmito salad recipe is supreming your grapefruit. We prefer to use a large bread knife for this task, though some people prefer a sharp paring knife. The bigger the fruit, the easier it is to use a large knife.
Now that you are a fan of hearts of palm, you'll want to know how else to use it. Hearts of palm are excellent in green salads and grain salads of all kinds and pair particularly well with avocado.
You can also use hearts of palm as seafood and meat substitutes in vegetarian and vegan dishes. Hearts of palm can be used instead of seafood in ceviche and “lobster” roll preparations, for example. And their somewhat stringy texture makes them a good replacement for crab—for example in hearts of palm “crab” dip or “crab” cakes.
You can even slice hearts of palm into coins, pat dry, and sauté them. Or, wrap them with a slice of prosciutto for an appetizer or snack. Or grill them! Finally, there is a pasta substitute made from hearts of palm called palmini—keto friendly!
Adding some minced shallots into this hearts of palm and avocado salad would also be delicious. You could also try sliced green onion.
Other Delicious Salad Recipes
If you love salad as much as we do, you'll want to check out some of our other favorite salads.
If you try this Hearts of Palm Salad recipe, we would love to hear from you! Please rate this recipe and leave a comment below—your feedback is invaluable to us.
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📖 Recipe
Hearts of Palm Salad with Avocado and Grapefruit
Hearts of Palm Salad features sliced hearts of palm, creamy avocado, and sweet-tart pink grapefruit.
Ingredients
- 2 pink grapefruits
- 1 15 ounce (400g) can hearts of palm
- 1 large avocado
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- ½ teaspoon celery seed
- ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
- ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- Use a sharp knife to cut off the very top and bottom of the grapefruit rind.
- Then, starting at the top, cut around the shape of the grapefruit until you reach the bottom, cutting off the rind and pith but as little of the grapefruit flesh as possible.
- Now hold your grapefruit over a bowl and use your knife to cut between each membrane of the grapefruit. Let the grapefruit sections fall into the bowl.
- When you are finished, squeeze the juice out of the remaining grapefruit into a different, small bowl and reserve for later.
- Repeat with the second grapefruit.
- Drain and rinse the hearts of palm. Pat dry and slice into ⅓-inch-thick coins. Add to bowl with the grapefruit.
- Cut avocado in half, working around the pit. Slice the half without the pit into cubes, then scoop out of the avocado skin and add to the bowl with the grapefruit and hearts of palm. Then remove the pit from the second side, cut into cubes, and add to bowl.
- Add olive oil, celery seed, salt, and pepper. Stir gently.
- Taste, and add more grapefruit juice from the small bowl if you’d like. I generally add another 1-2 tablespoons of juice, but it depends how juicy your grapefruit sections in the bowl were already.
- Add more salt and pepper to taste, and serve!
Notes
Expert Tips:
I prefer to use a large bread knife to supreme the grapefruits, though some people prefer a sharp paring knife. The bigger the fruit, the easier it is to use a large knife.
This salad is best eaten the day it is made. The grapefruit juice will delay the browning of the avocado a little bit, but by the next day, the avocado will not be the same bright green shade. That said, you can refrigerate leftovers and eat them for the next couple of days.
Celery seed can be replaced by dried herbs of your choosing. Dried oregano, basil, or thyme (or a combination of those) would work with this salad. We also love Penzey’s Sunny Paris Seasoning in this recipe.
Nutrition Information:
Yield: 3 Serving Size: 1Amount Per Serving: Calories: 263Total Fat: 16gSaturated Fat: 2gTrans Fat: 0gUnsaturated Fat: 12gCholesterol: 0mgSodium: 1408mgCarbohydrates: 31gFiber: 11gSugar: 12gProtein: 7g
Nutrition information is provided as a general reference for users courtesy of the online nutrition calculator Nutritionix.
Instagram Users: Now that you've made this salad with hearts of palm recipe, tag us @vanillabeancuisine or #vanillabeancuisine because we’d love to see your results!
More About Molly
Cooking healthy(ish) meals with seasonal ingredients is my passion. Trained as a French pastry chef, I spent over 10 years as a personal chef. Here you'll find well-tested recipes that you and your family will love!
mimi rippee says
This is so pretty, and I love the ingredients. Typically when I have friends over for dinner, or even raclette, when I serve a salad, I always include hearts of palm. I just love them so much! But I can't wait to add the avocado and grapefruit... such a great recipe.
Chef Molly says
I feel like hearts of palm are a completely unappreciated ingredient! Glad you love them as much as I do.