Pineapple Juice is a sweet, yellow-coloured juice squeezed from pineapples: not from the whole pineapple, but from the trimmings after the pineapple is cut for canning. It can be bought sweetened or unsweetened, in cans, bottles, as a frozen concentrate or as a powder.
Sometimes sugar, water and preservatives are added to the canned juice. Check the label if you need to know.
It can be drunk straight up, or used in baking or cooking, or used in mixed drinks, in which it is very popular.
The two most popular brands are Dole and Del Monte.
Cooking Tips
Fresh Pineapple Juice contains an enzyme bromelain, which is a natural meat tenderizer. It is used in many commercial meat tenderizers. This enzyme is destroyed in the canning process, so canned Pineapple Juice won’t work. Frozen will work; powdered or bottled won’t. Don’t marinate meat in Pineapple Juice for more than 20 minutes: the inside of a tough cut of meat will never truly get tender, and the outside of the meat will just get spongy and mushy.
The bromelain in fresh and frozen Pineapple Juice means that you can’t use it in recipes containing gelatin: the enzyme will break down the proteins in the gelatin, and your jelly dish will never set. You can, however, use canned, powdered or bottled Pineapple Juice.
Canned pineapple pieces and slices are packed in Pineapple Juice; this shouldn’t be wasted. Either use in your recipe or freeze until needed. You may think of recipes that call for water that you can swap the Pineapple Juice in for.
Substitutes
Mixture of orange juice and grapefruit juice.
Nutrition
Average of 10% sugar content.
Storage Hints
Canned Pineapple Juice can be stored 2 to 3 years.
Literature & Lore
Urban myth has it that safecrackers in the old days would soak their fingertips for a few minutes in Pineapple Juice before starting work, as the meat tenderizer protein in it would make their fingerprints temporarily unavailable (presumably it was the fresh juice)
The American actor W.C. Fields (1879 – 1946) often kept a thermos with him on film sets which he claimed was filled with Pineapple Juice. When someone actually swapped the contents (which was alcohol) with Pineapple Juice, he shouted “”Somebody put Pineapple Juice in my Pineapple Juice!”
