Pork with Pineapple

Ingredients and rice

To make pork with pineapple, the meat should not be fatty. Neck or belly won’t do. Shoulder or hind leg is ideal: you need a lot of meat and very little pork fat. You can use fresh, raw pineapple. But since you’ll also need syrup or juice, you can make do with a jar of canned pineapple rings in syrup. It makes the cooking simpler.

Choose a rice variety that stays fluffy. Basmati is very popular in India. Parboiled rice, sold as “steamed”, will also work.

1. Boil the rice in advance until fully cooked. To avoid missing the amount and proportions of liquid, it’s best to boil the rice in a large amount of water and then drain it. Transfer the cooked rice to a bowl or plate and cover it with something so the grains don’t dry out.

   

Pork with onion

2. Prepare the pork: trim off any large pieces of fat, membranes and bones thoroughly, and cut into large cubes or slices, the size of half an egg or a little bigger.

   

3. Fry the pork until browned. Melt the butter in a frying pan, add the cut pork and fry over medium heat until the released liquid evaporates and the meat begins to brown. Browning is very important so the pork tastes of fried meat, not stewed. Meat usually loses a lot of moisture when frying, which will boil it and keep it from browning. So don’t rush, and do the browning properly.

   

4. Fry the onion with the meat. Peel the large onion and chop it finely. When fried and then stewed, the onion becomes part of the sauce that makes the pork very juicy. Add the onion to the browned pork, stir and keep frying over medium heat. The onion should become soft and change color only a little. You must never overcook the onion.

   

5. Add the spices and water. In a mortar, grind 2-3 cloves, a pinch of salt and 0.5 tsp of coriander seeds. You can skip the salt, it’s up to you. Add the spice mixture to the pork with onion, stir and immediately add 1 cup of hot water (200 ml).

   

6. Cover the pan with a lid, reduce the heat to below medium and stew the pork with onion and spices for 15-20 minutes. During this time the meat will be completely done, and the onion will cook down and, combined with the water, become the sauce for the pello.

   

Assembly and baking

7. Lay the pieces of browned and then stewed pork in a suitable dish, spreading them over the bottom. The meat should fill more than half of the volume. Spread all the remaining sauce of onion and spices over the pork.

   

8. Add the rice with pineapple and spices. Mix the boiled rice with two pineapple rings, finely chopped. If the rice has stuck together a little or dried out, you can add 1 tbsp of pineapple syrup (21 g) from the can, then stir. Spread all the rice over the pork and sauce in an even layer.

   In a mortar, combine a quarter teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 5-6 shelled cardamom pods, or ground cardamom. Grind the spices to a powder and sprinkle over the rice. Pour 2-3 tbsp of the syrup (42–65 g) left from the pineapple over the rice.

   

9. Fry the pineapples in syrup. Cut the remaining pineapple rings into 4-6 pieces and put them in a small frying pan or saucepan. Pour in all the remaining syrup, add 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1-2 tsp of “brown” cane sugar. Stir gently and fry the pineapples and syrup over low heat. There’s little liquid, and it boils off quickly. Meanwhile the sugar caramelizes.

   

10. When the syrup begins to thicken, arrange the pineapple pieces over the rice in the dish and pour the remaining caramelized syrup over them.

    

11. Bake covered. Cover the dish with a lid or just foil and put it in an oven preheated to 200°C. Since all the ingredients are already ready to eat, the dish doesn’t need much heat treatment. It’s enough that, after the liquid in the dish begins to visibly bubble (there isn’t much of it), 5-10 minutes pass, and the pello is ready.

    

Serving

12. Take the finished pork with pineapple and rice out of the oven. You can stir the dish before putting it on plates. Or take the fried pineapple pieces off the top of the rice and put the rice on plates. Lay the pork pieces on the rice and add the pineapple. Garnish the dish with sprigs or leaves of parsley.

    

13. The dish is served hot, without delay. If you like spicy food, it’s quite appropriate to sprinkle a pinch of hot pepper over the finished dish before serving.

    

    Well-cooked pork with pineapple is amazingly tasty and fragrant. The dish is not like pilaf; it’s rather aromatic, tender meat with a side of rice that has soaked up the flavor of the sauce and the pineapple. An extraordinary combination.

    By the way, most of the spices used in this recipe are part of a curry blend. A simple curry blend usually includes turmeric, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon and more. Many people don’t like turmeric, but if there are no contraindications, it’s perfectly fine to use a curry blend to make this dish.