Take advantage of sales on fresh pineapple! Don’t be intimidated by the prickly fruit. Learn how to cut pineapple quickly and easily.

As the summer heat approaches, don’t you just have a hankering for juicy, sweet fruit? It’s too hot to eat, but sweet tropical fruits, summer stone fruit, and juicy melon? Well, they might convince you otherwise.

You might not be able to get to Hawaii anytime soon, but you can pretend, right?

My summer motto is to enjoy fresh fruit whenever you can. Fresh fruit tastes so much better than canned or frozen – particularly if you know how to prepare it.

A fresh pineapple with its intoxicating scent and sweet-tart flavor can be a treat, but its prickly exterior can seem intimidating to some. How in the world can you get into the goodness without hurting yourself?

Here’s a quick and easy pictorial to help you cut pineapple like a pro. This method is very similar to how we cut the melon and the grapefruit sections and will take just minutes.

How to Cut Pineapple:

1. Wash the pineapple.

As with the melon, rinse the outside of the pineapple with water and vinegar. Even though you aren’t going to eat the peel, you are going to cut through it, thereby possibly exposing the inner flesh to bacteria and other germs. By washing the surface, you reduce the risk of cross-contamination.

2. Make it stable.

Cut off the two ends and stand the pineapple on one end. In this way, the pineapple will be stable on your cutting surface, not wobbling all over the place.

3. Cut away the rind.

With a chef’s knife, cut away the rind, curving your cuts between the rind and flesh, thusly. Proceed around the sides of the pineapple until all the rind is removed.

You may see that the prickles of the pineapple go fairly deep. You can cut these away individually so that you can preserve the fruit in between.

4. Cut away the core.

Now cut through the pineapple, just to the side of the hard, inner core. Cut all the way down.

5. Remove the core.

Continue cutting around the core until you have several long wedges of pineapple.

6. Cut up the pineapple for serving.

Cut the wedges into spears or chunks to serve or use in recipes. Store leftover in a covered container in the fridge.

You can also freeze the pineapple in airtight containers to use later. If you’d like to freeze them to use just a handful of chunks at a time, be sure to follow this method of freezing individual fruits.

7. Repeat as necessary.

See? That wasn’t hard, was it? Now you can bravely go forth to your grocery store and snatch up those sale pineapples whenever you find them.