Pineapples

Got home yesterday to face up to the problem of what to do with the three pineapples (see 12th September), the smell of which was starting to accumulate in the garage.

Remembering the tinned pineapple jam which was an occasional treat of my childhood, I decided that the answer was to make them into a sort of jam which could be served with ice cream instead of maple syrup.

First step, prepare your pineapples. Chop off top and bottom, taking care not to chop off any finger ends. Good idea to use a serious kitchen knife, not some flimsy flexible affair. Then place pineapple upright on chopping board and peel by taking off vertical slices. Slice into around 5 slices one inch thick. Remove the eyes from the edges of the slices using a very short bladed kitchen knife (in my case a Kitchen Devils model number 602000 - Kitchen Devils being the only people who seem to offer such a thing. See http://kitchendevils.net/). This part of the operation is a bit time consuming and a bit messy. The pineapples were much better, much riper, than I had expected. Furthermore, the core seemed soft rather than woody. Dice the cleaned slices.

Second step, prepare some fallen cooking apples. Remove gunge, rot and peel. Chop into the pineapple. The unripe cooking apples should contain enough pectin to make the pineapples set, at least a bit.

Third step, place fruit, maybe a pint of water and a pound of granulated sugar (pineapples might be sweet, but one always adds lots of sugar to the rather less sweet fruits we grow for jam in England. So sugar, but rather, here) to a large saucepan. Bring to boil and simmer down to a jam consistency.

All went swimmingly until I got diverted and forgot about the simmering jam, left on rather a high heat, with the result that it caught. Foolishly, stirred most of the black stuff in, rather than just pouring the relatively untainted bulk into a clean saucepan. Wound up with a brown, jammy mixture in a flat pyrex dish. Tasted unpleasantly sweet hot, not too bad cold. Not too much burnt taste at all; maybe the same principle as toffee which is, after all, heading towards burnt. The brown of the toffee is presumably carbon, just like like the black on the bottom of the saucepan. On the other hand, a reasonable proportion of the surviving pineapple dice are a bit crunchy, so maybe the cores were not as soft as the knife had suggested.

We will see how much of the brown jam makes it to stomachs rather than compost heaps. Current thought is that the general idea was sound, just that the execution was a bit careless.