Hi a huge welcome to Steve's kitchen today we're going to be talking about
pineapples. How to pick one and how to prep one they're really quite easy to do if
you know how. When you go into a store you'll see sometimes people smelling the
base of the pineapple and if you get that beautiful syrupy sweet smell you
know your pineapples going to be pretty ripe. Now I'll talk a little bit more
about that towards the end but let's get on and prepare this pineapple. In case
you haven't noticed before there's this sort of spiral pattern that runs through a
pineapple from the top to the bottom. First thing we want to do is just take the top
off the pineapple, so that is pretty spiky we'll just discard that. Turn our pineapple
around and do the same on the bottom, just slice the bottom off. Now you don't
want to waste too much of the pineapple so take a knife and just carve off the
skin, you don't have to go too deep. Now a lot of people make the mistake of
carving way too much of the skin off because they're afraid of leaving these
little dots on which are really not edible but then you end up wasting a
great deal of the pineapple and there we've only really discarded the woody flesh.
So now you can see we've got these little holes with this woody pulp inside and it
looks like the best way to cut these out would be individually but actually
there's a much easier way, as I said before you see there's a line that's
running around in a spiral and it goes all the way around the pineapple to the
base so all you need to do is take a sharp knife and just cut a little
triangle and just remove, you'll see we're not wasting much there and if you look
inside you can see I've taken the whole of that little core out and then you just
turn the pineapple one more time and cut it. A little V remove that core and keep
turning it until you get to the top two pieces. Now this looks time-consuming but
actually it really doesn't take much time at all, just pull that round and
finish off down towards the bottom so I've got one spiral around let me just
start on the next line here, so I'll take those too
and I just again follow nature's design all the way up around the pineapple, so
now I've got two spirals and again just going to start at the top this time and
work my way around following the little spiral round. Now this is going to take me
maybe two or three minutes, it really won't take much longer but it's worth it
because you are not wasting any of that precious sweet pineapple nectar
and there you have it, that is my pineapple with very little waste. A tiny
bit down here so we barely wasted any of the pineapple and now we're just going
to divide this up whichever way you want. A lot of people like to take the core
out and I'll show you how we do that now. There's a tiny little wooden core in the
center which isn't so great eating a lot of people use pineapple coring machines
and there you waste so much of your beautiful fruit. So just cut this down
into quarters like that and then if this piece is too woody just trim it off, if
you don't have to go too deep just trim off a little bit of that hard core in
the center there and then you can take your individual pineapple pieces and
just slice them up and you are going to have the most beautiful sweet and ready
to go
pineapple and I do love pineapple that is so good.
Now let me bore you with a little facts about pineapples whilst I've got your
attention.
Have you ever been abroad where you had pineapple and it tastes so much better than
it was back home and even the core, let's try this bit, it's pretty woody, where even
the cores just melted in your mouth.
The main reason for that is because the pineapples in some places are grown
there and then and they're allowed to ripen on the actual bush and all those sweet
sugars go up there and you end up with this really quite dark almost an orange
colored pineapple that's so sweet.
In Australia we grow great pineapples and they have great flavor the
supermarkets still choose to import pineapplea from all around the world and
they just don't have the sweetness. So if you've been abroad you've been somewhere
like over in Hawaii or Sri Lanka, India and you had really great pineapple,
it's usually because they've been picked on the bush fully ripened and all that
has come up through the soil. Now when you buy pineapple that's been bought in
the supermarket and shipped over for miles, it comes off the tree unripe and then it has no
root system to draw that sweetness up, so it can only be
juice sugars from what's inside the pineapple and ripened in a shed or
warehouse so they're still great but not as good as if they're ripened so try to buy locally
if you can, it will be just fantastic. Then comment down below and let me know what
your favorite fruits are, I always read the comments and if I can I'll get back to you
but I love to hear, take care
subscribe to the channel, be good, see you shortly