My roommate bought a plastic tub of pineapple chunks a while ago (you know, the kind floating around in sugary pineapple goodness), and I just recently checked on them in her mini-fridge. The sugary juice stuff has sort of formed bubbles, and the stuff as a whole tastes and smells kind of sour and almost wine-like. My guess is that it started to ferment, but I don’t really know much about that stuff.
Anyway, I tasted a bit of the juice out of curiousity and it tasted kind of good. So I’ve got this tub of weird pineapple chunks sitting in the mini-fridge and I’m hungry, so I pose the question: is it safe for me to eat them?
I wouldn’t do it (partly since my doctor won’t let me eat pineapples at all, but mainly for the obvious reasons), but why don’t you give it a try and report back?
It is definitely fermenting. The juice probably has more in common with vinegar than wine. I do not know if it is harmful, though. When making fermented products, the type of bacteria used is controlled, but in your case you don’t know quite what’s in there.
I have eaten a bit of pineapple like that here and there without ill effect, but I can’t say with certainty that what you have there is safe.
I’m sure you’re joking, but your suggestion is enough to encourage me to try a couple chunks for now. How that goes and any further answers in this thread will dictate if I continue.
Of course bacteria aren’t used to make wine, yeast is the fermenting agent.
Apple juice fermented by wild yeast is quite tasty, I don’t see why pineapple juice should be much different in terms of how likely you are to hurt yourself with unintended microorganisms.
My mother used to keep jelly so long that it fermented. I loved the taste, and used to drink teaspoons of it and spread it on bread. It never did me any harm, apart from the fact that I’m dead and posting this from the great beyond.
When I was a kid, my grandmother canned peaches. My friend and I were sleeping in a tent outside the back door. We sneeked inside and took a jar of the peaches. We were higher than kites by the time we finished. We slept until noon and didn’t understand why we both had terrible headaches. I tlod my grandfather about the whole incident. He threw the rest of the peaches away. Too bad.
Your pineapple juice picked up some wild yeast. Yeast eats sugar and excretes alcohol as a waste product. Anything with sugar will ferment into a drinkable alcohol.
There are also bacteria out there called acetobacters that eat alcohol and excrete acetic acid as a waste product, turning alcohol into vinegar. If you expose your alcoholic brew to air you’ll inevitably pick up some acetobacters. Which is why you need a one-way valve on your carboy when fermenting.
