It’s been many years since I baked a fresh pineapple pie. I published my recipe in “Baking in America” (Houghton Mifflin 2002), and now that I live in Hawaii, local pineapple is always available. Except when it’s not.
For the past couple of months, I couldn’t find a Hawaii yellow pineapple anywhere on Kaua’i. Our favorite breakfast fruit is a papaya half stuffed with finely cut pineapple. Without pineapple, we got by with a squeeze of Calamansi lime. Then, just last week, I found pineapples at Costco. And they’re local! The pineapple drought is over. But what caused it?
Pineapples take 1 1/2-years to develop into ripe fruit. They are very sensitive to temperature. Last winter, a temporary dip in temperature (just a couple of degrees below 60˚F) caused developing pineapples to mature sooner than they would under normal conditions. They shifted to a vegetative condition. The result: a glut of slightly smaller ripe pineapples this summer and a highly reduced crop by early fall. Small businesses claimed whatever fruit there was, and we just did without.
