Kitchen Gadget: PROfreshionals Pineapple Corer

So I love pineapple... it is hands down my favorite fruit. It's just sooo messy! I prefer to purchase my foods in their natural form and most definitely NOT packed in syrup so my options were to give up pineapple, pay extra for the pre-chopped snack packs (and hope they are fresh and not sprayed with chemicals to keep the beautiful yellow coloring for longer), or get messy trying to slice it myself. Then I went to Walmart to pick up 1-2 things between shopping trips and saw this gadget. It's plastic and was fairly expensive so I didn't have great hopes for it but decided it was worth the risk if I could save the messiness (and maybe some of the juice to use in smoothies!) and still have my pineapple fresh. It was a good choice... this inexpensive gadget both cores and spiral slices your pineapple with minimal effort.

The packaging is fairly simple, a couple twisty-ties and piece of cardboard. Easy to remove from the 'packaging' so that is a plus in today's overly difficult packaging world (I'm talking to you electronics plastic packages that take a knife, scissors and two people to open on Christmas day!).

 My beautiful pineapple ready to be cored and sliced by a Prefreshional. 

I chopped off the top of the pineapple and placed it in a small dish to catch any juice. I suggest this quite a bit because the first time I used my pineapple corer I went through the bottom and juice went everywhere. 

Next you simple align the tube over the pineapple's core and twist. It is surprisingly easy... just keep twisting until you reach the bottom of the pineapple. What is difficult to judge however is how far down into the pineapple your corer actually is. You can gauge by seeing where the corer hits just below the top of the pineapple before you begin but if it is in a dish you can just go until you reach the bottom of the pineapple. 

It isn't stated on the packaging but pulling the pineapple corer out is a bit difficult and I tend to break the rings when I attempt to do so. For this reason I just cut through the skin of the pineapple in a straight line which makes removing the corer much simpler.

The final step to using this nifty device is to remove the handle by pressing in the yellow buttons and lifting it out of the tube. Then invert the tube and slide the rings right off. The whole process took maybe 5 minutes, including packaging up the pineapple and cleaning up. 

To clean the gadget you push the core out of the tube, rinse and run it through the dishwasher. If you don't use a dishwasher you can clean it with the rest of your dishes by hand. It it pretty easy.

Should your Walmart not have pineapple corers there is a link to this exact one on Amazon at the bottom of the post. If you don't use plastics in your house then you'll be pleased to know that there are plenty of pineapple corer/slicer combinations out there made in stainless steel as well. 

Now to go have some pineapple... yumm!