There are 2 reasons for adding salt to pineapple or to soak pieces of pineapple in salt water.

1) To make it taste sweeter

2) To reduce the tingly sensation of our tongue or mouth after eating 🍍

Salt does not make pineapple sweeter but it makes pineapple taste sweeter. 

Huh! What's the difference between being sweet and tasting sweet?

What we taste is how our brains process the interplay of various tastes.

There are 5 different tastes:

The 4 basic flavours of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and complex flavour umami or tastiness (sometimes  referred to as savoury).

A food or drink may contain more than 1 flavour and our brain has to process all the flavours to tell us what the taste is.

Take lime juice. It is sour. Adding sugar adds sweetness. The more sugar we add, the more sweet it taste and less sour it taste.

The sourness of the lime juice is not destroyed. It is still there. It just gets more and more hidden by sweetness. Eventually our brain tells us the lime juice is not sour but sweet.

A similar process goes on between bitter and sweet. Black coffee is bitter. As we slowly add sugar it taste less bitter. All the substance  that gives coffee a bitter taste is still there but we notice the bitter taste less and less.

Now coming back to 🍍🍍.

It is an acidic fruit with a PH of between 3 to 4 (PH of 7 is neutral and PH >7 is alkaline)

Adding salt does not destroy the acidity of pineapples. The acidity of pineapples comes not only from citric acid but also from malic acid.

Citric acid is sour. Malic acid is also bitter. Salt hides the sourness and bitterness of both citric acid and malic acid. So we taste these 2 flavours less and notice the sweetness of the pineapple more.

In this way, salt did not make 🍍 more sweet but just make it taste more sweet.

mmk, do you like bitter taste? Do you prefer your coffee dark without sugar or milk?

Perhaps one of the causes of your dislike of 🍍 is the taste of malic acid.

Now let's look at how delicious food taste and how umami it is.

When cooking we should not just use the exact amount of vinegar or salt to get the degree of sourness or saltiness we want. It will not taste delicious.

What we should do is to use more vinegar or salt than is required and then hide the excess flavour by adding a bit of sugar.

The final product that has all 3 elements of sweet, sour, and salty hiding one another to produce a complex umami will taste very delicious.

Umami has different kind of sweetness than that of sugar. It is like adding Monosodium  Glutamate (MSG) to food. It enhances the flavour of food. The sweetness of MSG is umami and not the sweetness  of sugar.

Instead of adding MSG, we can add umami to food by adding different  types of food and also by prolonged cooking to extract flavour.

For example  if we add meat or bones to a soup/stew and simmer it for many hours, the soup or stew will be full of umami

I find adding 🍍 to food adds umami or zest. What do you think.

Do you agree that we should use more salt or vinegar than necessary and then balance the flavour out by adding sugar? The food may be less healthy, but it will be more delicious. 

If you have not been doing so, I suggest  that you try it and see for yourself whether it will take your cooking to another level. 

Do you think that there are only 4 different  tastes  and umami is not a taste?

I have not covered using salt to  reduce the tingly sensation caused by eating 🍍. Do you agree that this works?

🦋