14-14: Sliced Pineapple with Nut Meringue is a unique desert. It was actually fairly tasty, just not something I would have thought to put together. This interesting dish has multiple textures, flavors, and temperatures which all interact nicely. I love raspberry, pineapple, and meringue, but I never thought to combine them, especially this way. 🍍
Meringue is probably one of my favorite applications of eggs in cooking. Egg whites only, but still a great use of eggs.
I really should have checked the TIPS section and followed the advice there. My meringue came out fine, but I like to take advantage of everything I can to have it come out successfully. From my previous experience, I chill the bowl and run the mixer on a medium high speed to get the maximum amount air whipped into the meringue in a short amount of time.
Here’s the few ingredients in the dish: Pineapple, raspberries, lemon, egg whites, hazelnuts, and sugar.
Sliced pineapple goes into the greased half hotel pan. It’s so convenient to pull them from the can instead of fresh sliced.
The recipe calls for chopped nuts, but I thought it would taste better if I toasted the nuts first. I processed the entire bag which may have been a bit overboard. After I pulled out the food processor to chop the nuts, I figured why not chop and toast them all?
I learned early on when making meringue to separate the eggs in a bowl first. DO NOT ATTEMPT to separate the eggs over the mixer. (I may or may not have done that the first time I tried to make meringue. I neither confirm nor deny this statement.)
I love how the wire whip looks in this photo. This needs to beat for a few minutes while I prepare the flavor aspect of the meringue.
To make the meringue sweet, the recipe calls for sugar and a sprinkling of lemon juice.
The meringue had almost stiff peaks after I added the sugar and lemon juice.
From my previous experience, the peaks were not stiff enough so I beat the mixture one more time.
The peaks are now stiff. Now to carefully fold in some more ingredients.
With a spatula, fold in some hazelnuts and lemon peel. This really rounds out the flavor of the meringue.
There was an attempt to pipe the meringue in a pleasant shape, but that devolved into just making sure the meringue stayed on top of the pineapple slices before I slipped them into the oven.
The small food processor was perfect for making the raspberry sauce. In retrospect, I should have added some more water and maybe some mint into the food processor while I mixed this up. A stronger food processor also might have been better, but it’s so big and I didn’t want to get the whole thing dirty for such a small amount of sauce.
My dish barely resembles the example photo, but it still tasted pretty good. The meringue got a little toasty in the oven and the sauce came out more like gelato or ice cream. My sauce was a little thick and the meringue fell off the pineapple when I tried to eat it. I would make some changes if I tried to make this again. As much as I enjoyed it, I just ate the rest of the meringue pieces and used the raspberry sauce in some other dishes I had that week.
Grade: B-
