Today’s culinary lesson from Chef Blake and the Rada Kitchen is how to properly cut up a pineapple. These tips and process will allow you to keep as much of the pineapple as possible for serving purposes. He will also show you a few different ways of cutting pineapple for serving on a platter such as small bites, strips, cascaded strips, and chopped.

How to Cut a Pineapple

All you are going to need is: a pineapple, a knife, a cutting board and a serving tray. Pretty simple, huh?!

Chef Blake’s tip to find the perfect pineapple is to smell the bottom of it. This may sound a little weird, but the sweeter the smell is, the better your pineapple will taste!

Start out by chopping the top and the bottom off.

cutting up

Chop of the sides by first cutting it into a squareish shape and then angle the knife around the edges to get excess skin off.

slicing up

Chop the skinned pineapple into 4 segments.

cutting up the pineapple some more

Make sure you separate the core from the rest of the fruit.

slicing the pineapple up to remove the core

Chef Blake will show you a few different ways to cut you pineapple into smaller pieces.

The first option is to cut the pineapple into large chunks. Simple and quick! The next option is basically the same as the first, but you will chop the pineapple into smaller cubes this time.

chopping the pineapple into large dice

The next two cutting techniques are pretty similar, as well. Instead of chopping the pineapple into chunks, slice it into long strips, wither straight across or diagonally.

chop diagonally to get some nice cascaded strips

The different cutting techniques will give your pineapple platter some character!

What is the Best Knife to Use for Cutting a Pineapple?

According to Chef Blake, the best kind of knife to use is a wider blade. A wider blade guides itself while cutting and allows for a cleaner and smoother cut!

The knife that Chef Blake used was the Rada French Chef’s Knife. This knife has a large blade for easy cutting!

all the details on the French Chef Knife

You can purchase this knife at the online Rada Kitchen Store.

Rada Mfg. Co. has been manufacturing Rada Cutlery fundraising products and helping non-profit groups fund raise since 1948 — last year working with over 19,000 churches, schools, teams and clubs. All fundraisers receive a 40% profit when they sell Rada Cutlery.

Learn more about our fundraising opportunities at our website!

Pineapple Facts

  • Pineapples are a good source of vitamin C
  • Pineapple from South America or Hawaii tend to be the sweetest
  • If you want a soft and juicy pineapple, keep it at room temperature for one or two days before cutting
  • A 1 cup serving of pineapple only has 70 to 85 calories!

All these facts were found on WebMD.com.

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Did you also know that besides selling knives and top-notch kitchen products, Rada Cutlery also provides fundraising opportunities? You can  sell 100% Made in the USA products like our Rada Cutlery knives and utensils for a 40% profit! We also offer other products, such as cookbooks, stoneware, and quick mixes.

Click here or on the catalog photo below to check out our fundraising catalog!

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Check out the Rada Cutlery EASY guide to learn more about why a Rada fundraiser is what’s best for your group!

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Slicing Pineapple Video Instructions

Check out Chef Blake’s video to get all the details on perfectly cutting a pineapple in your own home:

 


Start Cutting a Pineapple Transcript

Hello, welcome to Rada’s Test Kitchen. My name is Chef Blake and today I’m going to teach you a simple way to cut up a pineapple. Basically, you’ll get a 100% yield out of it for the most part. The most yield I should say. So start out by when you’re picking the pineapple at the grocery store what I was taught was to smell the bottom of it, and when you smell the bottom of it, basically the sweeter, the better. What you smell is basically what you will be tasting. So we are going to go ahead and chop off the top. Between the 2 knives that you could use; you could use a Chef’s knife, with the fat blade or you could use the real thin blade. For this I prefer the bigger blade and I’ll explain why.

So we’re going to start off by cutting the top off. We’re going to cut the bottom off. And so here is where we cut out the sides and how I do it is I picture it in a square more or less. And what that’s going to do is give me 4 sides and it’s going to give me 4 corners. So I’m going to go in at an angle here and then I’m going to kind of go with the curve all the way down. It is important to bring the knife back and forth and let that knife do the cutting. The friction: back and forth, back and forth. K, then we take the corners off the same way. Ok, I’m going to flip it over and make sure I get all those little parts off, discard all of the scraps.

Alright, the next thing is with it squared up, you’re going to take your knife and you are going to find the core which is right in the center here, and you can also see the core on this side much better and you are going to find it basically on both sides, and using the Chef’s knife you are going to cut straight down the middle. It’s going to be right in half.

Then we’ll cut it in quarters right down the middle like so. Then we’re going to prop it back up on its side and find that core and we’re just going to get that core out. Really the purpose I like the wider blade here is when I’m going to cut the pineapple down in half it doesn’t move as I go down. The blade kind of guides its self. If you were to use a thinner blade, it could create more waves and not cu.. You can also lay it on its side and fillet it like so.

Alright so now we have these nice chunks of pineapple so we can get everything. This is a 100% yield here. So you can cut it into thirds like so, cut it into chunks and that gives you these nice little bite sizes. You can lay it on its side and you can put it on a platter like that. This one is kind of fanned. I kind of cut it on a taper. So you can fan that one. So yeah, these are just a couple of ways to cut the pieces here.

These are like the little canned tidbits, just a fine dice here or a finer cut. So that is the most common way that I would cut up a pineapple. Get it into small bites, strips, elongated and cascaded strips here, much longer and bigger, and the bigger chunks.

Alright, there you go. That is how you cut up a pineapple. At least my way, its as simple as I can make it for you. It gives you a variety of different cuts. I hope you enjoyed, leave us some comments, and let us know your feedback. Thanks for watching.

End Cutting a Pineapple Transcript