Thursday, April 3, 2008

Pineapple don't Look like Apples.



Pineapple is my favorite fruit. When most people think of pineapple they only think of yellow, but a pineapple comes in a few more colors and they work to a pineapple buyers advantaage. A pineapple goes through three phases. The Green phase, the Yellow Phase, and the Red Phase.

Many people think that the way to tell if a pineapple is ripe is to pull on of the leaves out of the top of a pineapple. This is extremely false. Looking at the color of the pineapple and taking note of the smell is the way to tell. A green pineapple, although may look pretty, is not the type that you want. Sugar in this fruit is how it ripens well. When a pineapple is green it means that the fruit is not getting enough sugar to ripen correctly. It is good however to have a little bit of green in the pineapple.

The sugar in this fruit comes from the bottom and ripens as it travels up. A ripened, ready-to-eat pineapple should be about half yellow and half green. The lower half should be pretty yellow. The more yellow the better on a pineapple. This means the skin is soaking up a good amount of the sugar and making the insides softer and juicier. A yellow pineapple with a little bit of green skin at the very op is in perfect eating condition.

Lastly there is the red pineapple. This is not the pineapple you want to eat under any circumstances. A pineapple with red skin usually will also have oozing cuts, and brown leaves. This is a rotten pineapple. Red pineapples have had all of their sugar sucked to the surface causing the insides to become white and mushy with a taste like vinegar. Many people do not ever see red pineapples because they are usually never in supermarkets or fresh produce stores because these are the pineapples with the mold.

Many people never know how to tell that a pineapple is ripe or not, they usually just take one that looks good and hope for the best. Truth be hold there is a serious science to finding the best pineapple.

Image found at http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html.
Information found at http://www.wikihow.com/Tell-if-a-Pineapple-Is-Ripe.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What about grapefruit? Who thought they BORE any relation to grapes? Most people I've introduced to chermimoya aka guayabananas, say they taste like pineapple.