Ingredients · Fruit

Pineapple

Ananas comosus · Bromeliaceae (bromeliad family)

Pineapple
Dried pineapple — eleven products carry it, and it is the tropical note in this catalogue. It holds a real acidity through drying, which is unusual and useful: pineapple gives a fruit blend a sharp edge that reads as fresh rather than as sour the way hibiscus does. It is also very sweet, so it can carry a blend on its own where a milder fruit could not.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromSouth America (native range)
TasteSweet and sharply acidic with a tropical, faintly resinous edge that survives drying

How to use it

In tropical fruit infusions, hot and iced. It stands up to a strong base, so it works in matcha and green-tea blends where a milder fruit would vanish. Excellent iced. Rehydrates into a chewy, intensely sweet piece.

With food

Coconut. Mango and papaya. Lime. Mint. Ginger. Chile. Rum. Black pepper. Ham, famously.

With spices

Ginger. Chile. Cardamom. Star anise. Mint.

With tea

Matcha and green tea. Rooibos. White tea. Black tea for an iced tropical tea.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to South America, originating from the Paraná–Paraguay river drainages between southern Brazil and Paraguay. Christopher Columbus was the first European to encounter it, on Guadeloupe on 4 November 1493. No lot origin is named in our notes.

What happened

For about two centuries the pineapple was the most ostentatious object in Europe. It would not grow there without enormous expense, so growing one under glass became a way of demonstrating that you could afford to — and a pineapple became a symbol of wealth, and then of hospitality, which is why they are carved into gateposts, staircases and bedheads across eighteenth-century Britain and America. Its modern chapter is Hawaiian: James Dole moved there in 1899 and started a sixty-acre pineapple plantation in 1900, which grew into the Dole Food Company. One piece of botany worth knowing: a pineapple is not one fruit. Once the plant flowers, the individual fruits of all those flowers join together into a single multiple fruit.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

Ingredients Every plant, seed, bark and salt in the shop on one page — what it is, why it is in the blend, and where it comes from. See them all Collections Every shelf in the shop on one page — teas by leaf and flavour, spices by kind and cuisine. Open any shelf to see what is on it. Browse the shelves The Showroom The whole shop on one floor — every tea, spice and blend, filtered by what you are after, with the basket beside you. Open the Showroom Elsewhere Seventeen short trips — a place, a moment, a feeling — each with the teas and spices that get you there. Take a trip