Combine butter with the new aroma of pineapple

• 30 June 2026
• Recipes
• By Esma Demirhan

If you have ever made a fruit cup with fresh pineapple and come back an hour later to find the cream has gone loose and slightly bitter, you have met bromelain. It is a protease — an enzyme that breaks down protein — and it is very good at its job. The proteins it happens to break down include the ones holding your cream and any gelatine-set layer together.

The fix is heat. Bromelain denatures at around 70 degrees, so ninety seconds of simmering finishes it completely. Bring the chopped pineapple and a little of its own juice up to a simmer, hold it there while you count, then cool it fully before it goes anywhere near dairy. That is the entire technique. Tinned pineapple, incidentally, is already cooked during canning, which is why it has never caused this problem for anyone.

What you lose is a little of the sharp, almost green note that fresh pineapple has raw. What you gain is a fruit that behaves. We compensate by cooking it fast and hot rather than stewing it, and by adding a squeeze of lemon at the end once it is off the heat, which brings back some of the brightness without bringing back the enzyme.

The same warning applies to kiwi, papaya, figs and fresh ginger, all of which carry similar enzymes. Kiwi is the one that catches people out on tarts, because it usually goes on at the last minute as decoration and so nobody connects it with the filling that had collapsed by the evening.

← Back to the blog