How to Cut a Pineapple

If you are female and Korean, you probably have heard at least once in your life time (whether jokingly or seriously) that you’d better learn how to properly peel and cut fruit before you get married.  I sure heard it.  What the sexist?  Yeah…it’s probably because of the fact that old school Koreans always eat fruit right after their dinner – kind of as a social and digestive thing, in lieu of heavy desserts.  So, in a Korean household, if you want to eat an apple, you’re gonna have to first peel it, slice it into pieces, put the slices on a platter, stick toothpicks in them, and share it with everybody!  Raise your hand if you know what I’m talking about.

Maybe that’s what gave me the idea to write this light-hearted entry.  If you’re like “duh Julie, I already know how to cut a pineapple…” then bye bye… I’ll see you tomorrow.  For all the rest of you, keep on reading.  There ain’t no shame or blame.

Pineapples are kinda awkward, right?  It’s almost like they know they taste so sweet and succulent that they gotta protect themselves in every possible way by being all prickly and jaggedy EVERYWHERE!  Well, a pineapple is meant to be eaten, so you gotta caress it out of its hard exterior.  Here’s how.

Slice off the hair and butt and stand it upright on your cutting board.  Then using a sawing motion, slice it right down the center.  Keep the halves in tact and turn it 90 degrees.  With the same sawing motion, slice it down the center again.  Now you’ve got 4 pieces my friend.  You follow me?

Next, concentrate on one quarter at a time.  Stand the piece upright again and use your knife to whack that hard fibrous core off.  If you don’t feel like wasting any precious ounce of pineapple, fine keep it.  I don’t like to chew on pineapple like it’s gum, so I usually remove it. But you can use the core as a fun flavorful stirrer for your cocktails and mojitos!

Then using your cute green pairing knife, carefully shave around the contour of the prickly skin, to dislodge all of the flesh, but simultaneously remove all of those annoying brown “eyes” from the skin.

The final step is to slice, slice, slice!  Keep the slices right on the shell (stick toothpicks in them) and serve to your guests.  Repeat with the other remaining 3 chunks of pineapple.

The best part of this method is that you can pre-cut up your entire pineapple, but don’t have to worry about the pieces getting all slippery and slimy.  Keeping the pieces in the shell and storing them in a container in the fridge keeps them in tact and fresh.  This is a great way to eat more fruit, or snack on something healthier when you’re staring hungrily into the fridge.

There are many ways to cut up a pineapple, but I find this to be the easiest way when you just want to straight up eat it. My roommate in college did some funky contortions to cut hers up, but it always came out so pretty. How do you cut up yours?