With one pineapple...

** The whole uncut pineapple was 1047g. Flesh 490g. Skin 428g. 

With one pineapple, I am trying to...

A) grow another fruit using the top bit.

FAILED! No roots after more than a week. I must have bought a really old dead fruit or they did something to it to make it stop growing. Went into the compost.

B) make tepache with the flesh.

In this was...

1 litre water, 150g jaggery, 490g pineapple flesh (tasted almost sour so didnt expect this to succeed), all blended into a smoothie.

To that added 50g ginger from my ginger bug, 100ml ginger bug juice, 1 cinnamon stick, 4 cloves.

Covered with a cloth. The jaggery gave an illusion of a nice tasting result. 

The next day tasted it and decided to throw it out! Thats how bad it tasted. 

FAILED! The pulp will go into the compost.

I will try again and next time NOT use the ginger bug, and DO use a better sweeter pineapple.

C) make vinegar using the skin and core.

In this went...

80g white sugar, 900ml water (enough to cover the skin and cores), 428g skin and cores, 100ml ginger bug juice (instead of yeast)

I will follow roughly this guys instructions and timeline...

15Aug2020 update: bubbling nicely, no signs of mold, moved the top layer into the liquid.

16Aug2020 update: You can see it at the start of the video...

19Aug2020 day6:

If the bottle is moved, tiny bits of the pellicle drop off.

20Aug2020 update: It's day 7 and I was supposed to have strained out the solids today. But I am awaiting a reply on one of the forums to see what to do with the pellicle that has just formed on top...

21Aug2020 day8 update:

Took out all the solids. This pellicle was a thin film and powdery, unlike the thicker one in the acv batch1.  I just sieved out the lot, pellicle, skin, core, and whatever. 

It tasted ok, nothing great but better than expected considering the fact that the starting point was mostly pineapple skin and the core from a really tasteless fruit.

Now I presume stage one is done, converting the fruit sugar to alcohol.

The pH was 5.

Washed and baked the container.

Onto stage 2 of converting it to acetic acid / vinegar, hopefully with a pH of 3.

Added 2 TBsp of Bragg raw acv.

Strained again and left out the sediment.

Final liquid was 1112ml

acv batch1 on the left, this pineapple vinegar-to-be on the right.

Now wait!

10Sep2020 day28: FAILED :( 

I did 2 tests. Firstly smell... it smelt like the toilet. Second was pH... it didnt even change colour. No acidity at all!

On the plus side, it did have a pellicle half sunken. Luckily I did enough research to tell me that the pellicle wasn't the mother. Or else I might have kept it and contaminated future batches.  

***

So in conclusion... dont use any pineapple. This one was not sweet, it was not ripe either. Make sure it's over ripe, not rotting anywhere, no mold, and wash the skin thoroughly. I also suspect that pesticides could have been an invisible enemy.

I have one more pineapple vinegar in the making, using an over ripe fruit. I did include the skin so maybe that one's results will shed some light into the pesticide factor.

The next batch of pineapple vinegar will be without skin, just the flesh and core.