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Dessert

Candied Pineapple

Candied pineapple is pineapple slices cooked in a sugar syrup until translucent, then dried and packed in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,841 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Candied Pineapple

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pineapple

  1. Peel and cut the pineapple into thin slices, removing the core and cutting slices in half to form crescent shapes.

  2. In a pot, combine the pineapple with water and cook slowly until tender and clear.

  3. Remove the fruit from the pot.

Make the syrup

  1. Add sugar to the cooking water and boil the syrup down by one-third.

  2. Return the fruit to the pot and cook until transparent.

Dry and pack

  1. Carefully remove the slices and spread them on a platter to dry in the sun.

  2. Cook the syrup down to a candy stage and pour it over the fruit slices.

  3. Let the fruit dry and pack it in glass jars with dry sugar or brandied papers between each layer.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Provides the fruit that becomes tender, translucent and sweet after cooking in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, cooked to a candy stage, forms a syrup that preserves it.
Water
Forms the cooking liquid that softens the fruit before the sugar syrup is added.

The step that matters

Cook the fruit slowly until tender and clear. Gentle heat softens the pineapple evenly so it becomes translucent and absorbs syrup, while fast boiling can break the slices apart or toughen them.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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