Organic fair-trade dried pineapple from Togo, of the Smooth Cayenne variety, cut into slices with the hard woody core removed. 100 g resealable bag. Picked fully ripe, dried quickly at the lowest workable temperature, with no added sugar, no sulphites and no colouring.
How to tell it from the supermarket kind
Most dried pineapple sold in Europe is candied: soaked in sugar syrup until sugar has replaced much of the water, then usually treated with sulphites to hold the colour. The result is pale yellow, hard, glassy, and sweet in the way a boiled sweet is sweet.
Dried pineapple with nothing added looks and tastes different: deeper amber-gold, chewy rather than glassy, and intensely, aggressively pineapple — sweet, but with the acidity of the fruit still fully present. It is a far more interesting thing to eat, and slightly startling if you were expecting the confectionery version.
No sulphites matters practically: sulphites are a declarable allergen above 10 mg/kg and a well-known trigger in asthma.
Smooth Cayenne, and why the core is removed
Smooth Cayenne is the classic commercial pineapple — large, cylindrical, high in juice and acid, and named for its unusually spineless leaves. It is the variety most canned pineapple has always been made from, and it dries particularly well because the flesh is dense.
The core is cut out before drying, which is not a given — cheaper dried pineapple often leaves it in. The core is woody and stays woody however long you dry it, and it is the single commonest complaint about dried pineapple. Cored slices are worth the difference.
The fair trade part, specifically
This supply chain involves more than 300 small farming families in Togo, organised into cooperative groups. BIOFRUI has worked in the region for close to thirty years.
The structure: fruit bought from those cooperatives; dried in a workshop in Togo rather than exported raw for processing in Europe; training provided locally; and a development fund paid on top of the price and spent according to what the producer groups themselves decide.
The local drying is the part that actually matters. Processing where the fruit grows keeps that value — and those jobs — in the producing country, instead of exporting a raw commodity and importing back a finished product. That is a more concrete claim than most fair trade labelling makes.
How to use it
-
As it comes — a slice at a time; the acidity makes it hard to stop.
-
Chopped into muesli, granola, yoghurt or a trail mix, where it cuts through anything heavy or nutty.
-
Soaked twenty minutes in warm water, rum or juice — it plumps back remarkably close to fresh and is excellent then in a cake or over ice cream.
-
In savoury cooking: chopped into a rice dish, a tagine, or a sweet-and-sour sauce.
-
With cheese — the acidity does the same work as a chutney.
Three honest notes
Sugar. Drying removes water and concentrates everything else. This is a sugar-dense food, and sticky dried fruit clings to teeth — not last thing at night, and rinse afterwards.
Acid and the mouth. Pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme, and dried pineapple concentrates it. That is why eating a lot of pineapple can leave your tongue and the roof of your mouth feeling raw — the enzyme is genuinely working on the tissue. It is harmless and it stops when you stop, but it is a real effect rather than imagination.
Bromelain and medicines. Bromelain has some antiplatelet activity and can increase the absorption of certain antibiotics. Eating dried pineapple as food is not a concern; it is worth knowing if you take an anticoagulant and are eating a great deal of it.
There is no authorised EU health claim for pineapple or bromelain, and we are not going to imply one.
Storage
Close the bag properly, and keep it cool, dark and dry — the fridge in summer. Unsulphured dried fruit keeps some moisture, so it will harden if left open and can mould in a humid kitchen.
Chop it for very young children — whole pieces of dried fruit are a choking hazard.
treatfuls
treatfuls
treatfuls
