Pineapple for dating, cooking, baking and drinking

Pineapple is not among my favorite fruits. Not for eating by itself anyway. But I love including it in savory and sweet dishes, and for mixing cocktail drinks. Canned pineapple, I am barely able to tolerate except in crushed form.

That may sound strange coming from someone who grew up in a country where pineapple has been ubiquitous since before I was born. Pineapple is native to South America; Spain introduced it to the Philippines during the colonial period. Whether pineapple was raised as food back then or for weaving the fiber from the leaves, I am not sure, but there is a claim that “Piña cloth weaving reached its peak of perfection in the late 18th century and in the first half of the 19th century.”

Curiously, the association between Spain and pineapple cropped up recently but, this time, cloth weaving is not involved in any way. In a supermarket in Spain, a pineapple placed upside down in the shopping trolley means the shopper is looking to hook up. I am not kidding. I follow BBCNews on Instagram and one of its posts led me to a full write-up about the craze (highly recommended read).

I don’t live in Spain, I’m not interested in hooking up, but I do have a list of recipes that include pineapple among the ingredients. But, first…

How to skin and cut pineapple without waste

I’ve seen a lot of chefs on TV cutting off a thick chunk of the pineapple’s skin to remove the “eyes.” So wasteful. Those eyes are at least a quarter of an inch deep, there’s a lot of edible flesh between the eyes and, ergo, so much of the luscious flesh gets discarded with the skin. Read the full post →