Fresh pineapple tips: How to select and cut a fresh pineapple | Herbalife Advice
Like 3 Dislike 0 Published on 6 May 2013
I'm Susan Bowerman, registered dietician and today we are talking fresh pineapple.
You know a lot of people rely on frozen pineapple or maybe juice-packed canned pineapple - which is fine. But part of the reason why many people don't tackle fresh pineapple is because they just don't know how to cut them. So, today I'm going to show you a quick way to get all of the delicious flesh from a fresh pineapple. You know pineapples are a good source of vitamin C like strawberries and oranges and if you are used to having those fruits in the morning you may want to switch it up sometime with some fresh pineapple.
Let's talk first about how to select a pineapple when you're at the grocery store. What I usually look for first is to look at the color a little bit of green color on what they call the shoulders of the pineapple is a good sign. Look at the bottom make sure there isn't any mold on the bottom of your pineapple and I usually give it a little bit of a sniff if it smells like a good pineapple it's usually good. Sometimes they smell really sweet and syrupy and if they do they might be over ripe so I kind of steer clear of those.
Once you buy your pineapple and you are ready to take it home you are going to store it in the refrigerator with the crown on you don't want to take the crown off. Once you are ready to cut you're going to remove it from the fridge because it's usually better when it's cold. And the easiest way to take the crown off is to just twist it off it just comes right off and you can toss that away. And the way that I'm going to cut my pineapple were not going to prepare rings because most people are just looking for chunks of pineapple to put into a fruit salad. And I'm using a serrated knife you want to use a heavy knife and one that can cut through the Rhine. And all you are going to do is simply cut off the top and I can already see this is a beautiful pineapple and then cut off the bottom. Now what some people do if they do want rings is they will go through this tedious process of cutting the outside and cutting rings. But we are just going to do this simple cut.
And I'm just going to cut my pineapple in half we are going to cut a half at a time and if you look at the pineapple you can very easily see that there's a core in the middle that's kind of the tough fibrous part of the pineapple that you usually don't want to eat. So what I do is I'm just going to make a cut all the way down to the Rhine not all the way through but just all the way down to the Rhine on either side of this core. And when you do that you can kind of open it up and you can see all the pieces that you are now going remove from the pineapple. Then what I do is I put my knife about 3 quarters of an inch down and just cut through and just take out that fibrous core. Now when my kids were little and they were teething I used to give this to them so if you have any kids in the house that are teething it's a great teether because its sweet and its juicy but it's so fibrous that they can't really break it up so just a little tip.
Ok so now we have 3 nice what I would call filets to our pineapple and you're just going to take your knife and you're going to cut right against the Rhine on either side. And I'm just able to lift out this beautiful chunk of pineapple and I'm going to do the same thing on the other side there's my second filet and then finally that tenderloin that we got in the middle. If you have any brown spots like this you can simply shave those off. And now depending on how you want to use it if you're just going to make fruit salad you can very easily cube it up like that. If you want to for instance put in on a platter more like a fruit display and you want longer spears you can just cut this up like this and that's another way that some people like to do it because it's very attractive that way.
The other thing that is nice with these longer pieces is that if you've never had pineapple on the grill its delicious if you're grilling fish or you're grilling chicken you can just take these fresh pineapple spears and just throw them on the grill for a little bit and just let it get brown and the sugar kind of caramelizes. And you can either serve it with your fish or with your poultry or you can just serve it as a nice dessert. It's really easy so you can see how simple that was it just took me a minute to cut that up. So if you're intimidated by fresh pineapple, no longer. So give it a try at home in place of that frozen pineapple or that canned pineapple that you've been eating.
For more nutrition advice from Herbalife visit http://www.DiscoverGoodNutrition.com or take a look at my YouTube playlist: http://hrbl.me/VJ6XEl.