How to Dehydrate Frozen Pineapple | Super Easy!

Dehydrated pineapple is one of my favorite snacks. Unfortunately, pineapple is one of my least favorite fruits to prepare for dehydrating. That’s where both canned and frozen pineapple come in! In this article, I’ll show you how to dehydrate frozen pineapple. And at the end of the article, I’ll link to another article on how to dehydrate canned pineapple. Both work great and are easy to do!

How to Dehydrate Frozen Pineapple

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Now let’s get into a step-by-step guide to dehydrating frozen pineapple.

Prep the Frozen Pineapple for Dehydrating

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that I prefer to dehydrate frozen or canned pineapple instead of fresh, because it’s a lot easier. That’s definitely true. However, that doesn’t mean that you should just dump the frozen pineapple onto your dehydrator trays and start dehydrating.

For the best results, follow these simple steps to prepare your frozen pineapple for dehydrating.

Step 1: Break Apart the Frozen Clumps

If you’re lucky, you won’t have any pieces of frozen pineapple stuck together when you open the package.

But in my experience, there are always some pieces of pineapple that have frozen together. This happens if there is any slight defrosting that occurs before you put the pineapple into the freezer. For instance, if you buy the frozen pineapple on a hot day, and then take 15 minutes to drive home and unload your groceries before getting the pineapple into the freezer, it may have thawed just enough to stick together after you put it in your freezer.

The good news is, it’s typically easy to break apart the pineapple pieces that froze together. You can see in the photo above what the pineapple looked like after I broke the pieces apart.

Hint: Take a close look at the photo to see the thickness of some of the frozen pineapple chunks. Pay special attention to the one in the upper left, as it’s about to be transformed. 🙂

Step Two: Cut Large Pieces of Pineapple into Smaller Pieces

As you can see in the image above, some of the pieces of pineapple are really large. They are so thick, that even if they weren’t frozen, if you tried dehydrating them as is, they’d dry on the outside long before the inside had a chance to dry. You may not ever get them to dry all the way through, which could result in moldy fruit down the road.

The solution that I’ve come up with for this is to cut the thick chunks of pineapple through the middle, to make them thinner. Then cut each of those two pieces in half to make the frozen pineapple chunks smaller.

As you can see in the photo above, one piece of pineapple ended up being four smaller and thinner pieces of pineapple.

Note that if some of the pieces of pineapple are smaller to begin with, you don’t need to do as much cutting. The main thing to keep in mind is that smaller pieces dry faster and both the inside and outside of the fruit dries completely more easily.

Step 3: Place the Cut Pineapple Pieces on Dehydrator Trays

Next, place the pieces of cut, frozen pineapple on dehydrator trays. You can actually do this as you cut them.

Avoid overlapping any of the fruit. As much as is possible, put a bit of space between the pieces of pineapple. However, it’s not worth spending a crazy amount of time arranging the pineapple. The main thing is to avoid overlapping.

Pro tip: If you find you must overlap some pieces of the frozen pineapple, spread them out after a couple of hours. They’ll shrink up in the dehydrating process, which helps you put more space between them over time.

Dehydrate the Frozen Pineapple

Now it’s time to do the actual dehydrating! Here are the steps for dehydrating frozen fruit.

Step 1: Set the Dehydrator Temperature to 145 Degreens Fahrenheit

Since the pineapple is frozen, it naturally takes longer to dry than fresh pineapple.

To speed up the process, set the temperature on your dehydrator to 145 degrees Fahrenheit, and run it at that temperature for one hour only.

Now let’s face it. It’s easy to get impatient, especially with dehydrating since it takes a long time. Because of this, you may be tempted to run your dehydrator at this high temperature for the entire time.

Don’t.

Just don’t.

No matter how tempted you are to dehydrate the frozen pineapple at 145 degrees the entire time, trust me when I say that you don’t want to do that!

The reason is that dehydrating at too high of a temperature can result in what is known as “case hardening.” Case hardening is when the outside of the dehydrating food dries so fast, that it becomes hard, before the inside has a chance to dry completely. If case hardening occurs, no matter how long you run your dehydrator, the inside will never dry. Then your dehydrated fruit will mold while in storage, and none of us want that!

Pro tip: I use the Cosori Premium stainless steel dehydrator, which you can get. on Amazon. It has a timer on it. If the dehydrator you use doesn’t have a timer, be sure to set a timer to remind you to lower the temperature after an hour.

Step 2: Reduce the Temperature on Your Dehydrator to 125 Degrees Fahrenheit

After the first hour at 145 degrees, I reduced the temperature on the dehydrator to 125 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the recommended temperature for dehydrating fruit and is what you want to use the remainder of the time when dehydrating pineapple and all other fruit.

Frozen Pineapple after 4 Hours in the Dehydrator

Here’s what the previously frozen pineapple looked like after four total hours in the dehydrator- one hour at 145 degrees Fahrenheit and three hours at 125 degrees Fahrenheit.

You can see that especially the smaller pieces of pineapple are starting to look dehydrated. But looks can be deceiving! They are starting to shrivel up, but are still very, very moist.

Pineapple After 7 Hours in the Dehydrator

I put the pineapple back into the dehydrator for three additional hours, for a total of seven hours.

I didn’t take a photo of the pineapple at this point because it looked pretty similar to how it looked three hours earlier.

It was getting there, and had shriveled up a bit more, but still had a lot of moisture.

I put it back into the dehydrator, still at 125 degrees Fahrenheit, for four more hours.

Pineapple after 11 Hours in the Dehydrator

In the above photo you can see how the previously frozen pineapple looked after 11 hours in the dehydrator. You can see that it has shriveled significantly.

It was almost completely dry at this point, but to be on the safe side, I decided to put it in for an additional three hours.

Pro tip: When in doubt, run the dehydrator longer than needed. Especially when dehydrating at a reasonable temperature, such as 125 degrees Fahrenheit, you really don’t have to worry about over dehydrating food.

Total Time for Dehydrating Frozen Pineapple

I ended up dehydrating the frozen pineapple for a total of 14 hours. You can see how dry it looks in the photo above.

Fruit, such as pineapple, which has a high sugar content, is often still flexible, even when completely dehydrated. The pineapple was still flexible at this point, but when I tore open some pieces, they were completely dry inside.

How to Dehydrate Frozen Pineapple Faster

Dehydrating in general, is a slow process, especially if the food you’re dehydrating has a lot of moisture. Most fruit, including pineapple, has a lot of moisture, so it takes a long time. It’s even slower when you start with frozen pineapple.

If you want to speed up the process of dehydrating frozen pineapple, you can thaw it first. I recommend letting it thaw in the fridge overnight. If you’re in more of a hurry, you can pop it in the microwave for a couple of minutes to thaw it.

Regardless of how you thaw the pineapple, when thawed, there will be a lot of juice. Drain the juice before putting the thawed pineapple in your dehydrator.

Starting with thawed pineapple may cut off an hour or two of dehydrating time. Another way to speed up the process is to cut the pineapple into smaller pieces. The smaller the pieces, the less time they take to dehydrate.

I personally like the size of the pineapple pieces you saw in this article, because they were a nice size for snacking. When it comes to dehydrating, patience is indeed a virtue. 🙂 The good news is, most of the time is hands off, and you don’t have to keep a close eye on your dehydrator. Dehydrated pineapple tastes like candy, so the results are definitely worth it!

Storing Dehydrated Pineapple

I almost always store my dehydrated food, including fruit such as pineapple, in mason jars. You can use a lid such as these plastic lids that you can buy on Amazon. Those work fine, and if you’re like me, a tasty treat like dehydrated pineapple disappears fast.

But if you want to dehydrate pineapple to store longer term in your prepper pantry, then I recommend vacuum sealing it. To vacuum seal dehydrated pineapple in mason jars, you’ll need two things, both of which you can get on Amazon. First, you’ll need a vacuum sealer. You’ll also need mason jar attachments to use with the vacuum sealer.

While these are an investment, they are well worth it since vacuum sealed food lasts much longer.

Related Articles

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll also enjoy these related articles.

• How Much Do Dehydrators Cost?
• How to Dehydrate Frozen Peaches
• Dehydrating Frozen Mangoes
• How to Dehydrate Canned Pineapple
• Dehydrating Frozen Cherries