Feeling quite pleased with the paintings of close-ups on the skin of pineapples. They remind me of salt and li hing mui powder and the smell of overripe pineapples near rotting high in the air. I miss that smell.
As the fruits grew back after each picking, they got successively smaller, and the companies would stop harvesting because these smaller fruits were supposedly less marketable. (I don’t know, now I wait for those little baby pineapples to go on sale at Safeway, but whatever.) So those smaller leftover pineapples got to ripen on the plant and stink up the air with their sweet almost-wine, sort-of-garbage-y, perfume.
Narrowing in on the surface of the iconic local fruit, you’ll notice that the individual “eyes” are farther apart or more yellow at the bottom, because it ripens from bottom to top.
This is why most of the time a pineapple is sweeter at the bottom then at its top. And also explains why my family slices pineapple lengthwise into long spears as opposed to rings or chunks. Everybody gets a little bit of everything – and is ensured a few bites of extra sweet pineapple. (A helpful tip in case you don’t know how to cut a pineapple.)
Does anyone know what happened to pineapple bugs? What’s the theory on salting pineapple? Have a pineapple memory? Share it here in the comments.