Sous Vide Pineapple

Pineapple is an amazing fruit. I love the flavor, tartness, and sweetness.

The first recipe I tried when making a sorbet was with canned pineapple. I loved the final texture of the sorbet, but unfortunately a tinny flavor permeates the canned pineapple and thus the sorbet.

My wife, Pineapple, and I wanted something similar to the canned pineapple result, but without the tininess. This means we wanted to preserve the texture, keep the pineapple flavor high, make the fibrous texture low, and eliminate the tin.

For our next attempt we chose to go with raw pineapple; we filled a pint with raw pineapple, froze it, and processed the pint on "sorbet" but found that the flavor wasn't sweet enough and the pineapple flavor was dull. Also, my mouth and my gut do not like it when I eat more than about a scoop of raw pineapple.

Because I've grilled pineapple in the past and the result significantly increased sweetness and was much easier to digest, I decided to try grilled pineapple. The manual prep takes a while and grilling requires me to watch the pineapple while it cooks, so those are already strikes against this approach. But I persevered and learned something new: don't grill indoors: you'll trigger all the fire alarms and might cause smoke damage to your house. Oops! I guess grilling is better done outdoors.

The 3-alarm grilling aside, I loved the sweetness and smoky flavor which were brought to the sorbet. But I want a less-dangerous approach since I don't always have access to a grill.

So we decided to attempt to sous vide the pineapple. Sous vide ended up being a great alternative because the sous vide allows the pineapple to soften and sweeten similarly to grilling but with less hassle, less smoke, and more consistency.

Ingredients

• 1 large fresh pineapple
• Quart or Gallon zip-top bags

Instructions

1. Heat the sous vide to 180 degrees Fahrenheit (82 degrees Celsius)
2. Prepare the pineapple
1. Cut the top and bottom from the pineapple
2. Cut vertically into quarters
3. Remove the core
4. Remove the skin/husk
• While I often leave a little of the skin behind, you might prefer to remove those small brown bits as well
3. Place the pineapple in the zip-top bag
• I will put a single quarter-pineapple per quart-sized bag
• I will put three quarter-pineapples in a gallon-sized bag
• These quarters will overlap a little, so I alternate orientations
4. Place the filled bags into the heated sous vide
• Drive the air out of the zip-top bags and seal them
5. Set the sous vide to cook for 8 or more hours
6. Check on the bags every 15 minutes until they no longer inflate
• If the bags are inflated, release the steam and re-seal the bag
7. Remove the pineapple from the sous vide and let them cool
• At 180 degrees, these are way to hot to eat right now
• If you are in a time crunch you can place the filled, cooked bags into an ice bath
8. Store or enjoy!
• Once the bags are cool to the touch, I put them in the fridge for future use (it might be a few days before I can eat the cooked pineapple)

Here is what the final result looks like inside the bags:

Note that if you have a wand-style sous vide, you might be able to cook for less time. I find that I can cut down on about 25% of the cook time with sweet potatoes so you may be able to do the same with pineapple.