One thing I love about Facebook is whenever anything ever remotely mentions bacon I can be sure to have at least a half a dozen friends of mine tag me. And if you have been around Facebook the last couple weeks undoubtedly you have seen “The Swineapple”.
Conceptually it is a very simple dish: Hollow out a pineapple, stuff it with some pork, wrap it with bacon, and smoke it for 4 hours. I had a pineapple sitting on my counter and decided to give this one a try. Was it any good?
Well, before we get in to that let’s talk about pork. The original recipe calls for country style ribs which I have never really been a fan of. In reality they are more of a pork chop than a rib, the meat can be tough, and they generally don’t have a lot of good flavor in my opinion. They are usually cut from up near the shoulder but I also saw some labeled “loin” country style ribs so I am guessing they were cut from a bit further back on the hog.
My first thought with this recipe was to use a pork tenderloin. Seems like it would be a great size. But the more I thought about it the more I realized cooking a tenderloin for 4 hours would not be good. The tenderloin has very little fat or connective tissue so a long, slow cooking process would leave the meat very dry and mealy. The country style ribs were much, much cheaper than the tenderloins so I grabbed a pack of the loin country style ribs from the store. Looking back I wish I had gone with the shoulder ribs.
The first step: hollow out the pineapple. This isn’t too hard but it is hard to get the cavity in the pineapple big enough to accommodate a decent amount of meat without the pineapple breaking apart. I erred too far on the side of making sure the pineapple didn’t break and the hole in the pineapple ended up being a bit small.
Step 2: Rub the ribs. I wanted to get a bit more flavor on the meat so I rubbed them down with a mixture of brown sugar, paprika, cayenne, salt, and pepper. I probably was a bit heavy handed with the paprika on this one. Any standard rub rub will do for this though. If you plan far enough ahead I would also suggest brining the ribs overnight.
Step 3: Stuff the meat into the pineapple. Once again, you want to be sure you don’t break the pineapple up too much so you don’t really need to exert much force here. Just shove a couple of the ribs into the hole in the pineapple.
Step 4: Wrap in bacon. I went with a fairly rudimentary bacon lattice instead of wrapping it. If I were going to cook this on the smoker I probably would have wrapped it but the lattice was the perfect size to just lay over the pineapple and tuck in around the edges.
Step 5: Cook. The original recipe calls for smoking it for 4 hours but being an apartment dweller that is kind of out of the question so I put it on a broiler pan in the oven at 250 for 4 hours. This was almost the perfect amount of cooking to make the bacon a bit crisp but not burnt. I also hit it with the broiler for a couple minutes at the end to caramelize the rub.
And here is the finished product. It looked good and smelled great.
After letting it sit for a few minutes I sliced into it. As expected the bacon lattice started falling apart but that isn’t that big of a deal to me.
As I cut into it I could tell the meat was pretty tough. The shoulder country ribs would have most likely been much more tender than this meat so learn from my mistake.
The bacon and pineapple were awesome. That is one of my favorite flavor combinations and I have been know to go to a breakfast buffet and load up a plate or two of nothing but bacon and pineapple. The pork though? Not so much. It was fairly flavorless, tough, and had a weird mushiness to it. I was expecting it to pick up some flavor from the bacon and the pineapple but no such luck. As I was eating it I realized what part of the problem was:
Papain
Papain is an enzyme that is found in high concentrations in papaya but is also fairly abundant in pineapple. It is used in commercial meat tenderizers and in general turns the meat a bit mushy more than tender. That would account for the weird mushy texture the meat had. But why do people use pineapple on ham all the time? 99% of the time people use canned pineapple for this and the papain enzyme is basically shut off during the canning process.
What is the final verdict on the Swineapple? Pass. I could use a different cut of pork and it might be better but the papain would have its way with whatever cut was in there. This is yet another one of those dishes that looks and sounds a lot better than it actually is. But I will be making more bacon wrapped pineapple in the future.
