Please Don’t Put Hot Fruit In Savory Food
Pineapple on pizza is for picky children only!
Arguably one the most controversial food questions of all time, the longstanding debate surrounding pineapple on pizza has fueled my rage fire for years. Today, I’m going to explore the relative merits of hot fruit in a savory context.The controversial kinship between pineapple and pizza is one of many potential flavor partnerships to explore. Today, we pose the question: Does hot fruit have any place in savory cuisine?
I’ve invited my trusted food colleague, Izzie Ramirez, to provide her insight on this impossible issue and to try to sway me from my unmovable stance: hot fruit should never be in any hot salty food, ever. Here is what she had to say.
Izzie Ramirez: My argument is that those who don’t like to experiment with their palate — boring. All good cuisine had some flavors clashing together, you can’t have everything be savory or everything be sweet. The blueberry pizza at &pizza? I fuck with that. In addition to experimentation in the pizza world, culturally, hot fruit plus savory dishes are a thing. At least in Caribbean and Mexican cuisine. Puerto Ricans have a dish that is basically plantain lasagna. Yummy.
Pineapple on pizza is scientifically proven to be absolutely delicious. You got savory. You got sweet. You got even a bit of sour. That’s super fun. Pineapple pizza also says, “Hey, I like to be adventurous, but I’m not gonna put fucking salad or penne pasta on my pizza.” Also, imagine this: barbecue chicken pizza with pineapple and jalepeño. Doesn’t that sound fun? Also, I’m not super picky with what I eat — except for pickles, vinegar, mustard and mayo — so maybe that’s why I’m okay with this apparently controversial take.
Hawaiian pizza, specifically, is the move though. I’m not going to eat pineapple on a plain cheese pizza. That’s not adding anything to the flavor profile. There’s got to be some kind of meat, whether it be ham, Canadian bacon, regular bacon, sausage. I don’t care. The point of the pineapple is to bring out and highlight the flavor of the meat. That’s why it works so well with ham. Haven’t you ever had a Christmas ham? Those normally are cooked with rings of pineapple. Why? Because it’s DELICIOUS.
So, Izzie makes some valid points. Flavor balance is crucial to all good food. I grew up around predominantly Chinese cuisine, to which flavor harmony is crucial. Therefore, the importance of sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and bitter are not lost me. However, while I can understand the use of white sugar in food as a sweetener, adding a whole ass piece of fruit just not right. The overwhelming sweetness of pineapple on pizza is not worth it! It’s a clear attempt at distracting the consumer from the beautiful reality of the greasy cheesy monster in front of them. Not fair to pizza at all, in my opinion.
Truthfully speaking, the appeal of fruit is in its refreshing crisp flavor, its crunchy texture, and coldness. Fruit is best cold! Cooking fruit reduces its texture to stringy sliminess, produces excess water in food, negatively impacting the overall mouth feel of surrounding ingredients. A Very Bad Call! The only fruit that should be cooked and served hot is the tomato. Reducing the product of photosynthetic labor performed by the beautiful greenery of this earth, is a goddamn shame. The plants dedicate their lives to converting sunlight to sucrose and how do we reward them? By cooking the shit out of the fruit of their labor (ha), and putting it on cheesy tomato bread. Rude.
