The crust and filling of a Taiwanese pineapple cake (鳳梨酥) in the open format of a Nyonya pineapple tart: a pressed milk-powder shortbread shell under a layer of pineapple cooked down to a paste. The shell is too short to roll, so it gets pressed into the pan; the filling is finished by weight, not by eye.

Ingredients

(A) Pineapple filling — make a day ahead

   
1000g fresh pineapple flesh, peeled and cored (a 1.6–1.8kg pineapple)
70g granulated sugar
30g maltose
15g lemon juice
20g unsalted butter
1g salt

(B) Shell

   
90g unsalted butter, softened
35g powdered sugar
1.5g salt
1 egg yolk (~18g)
130g cake flour (or 112g all-purpose flour + 18g cornstarch)
20g whole milk powder
20g almond flour

Steps

  1. Grate the pineapple flesh on the coarse side of a box grater, or pulse it in a food processor to a shreddy pulp. Stop short of a purée — the fibre is what gives the filling its body.

  2. Weigh your empty pan and write the number down. Combine the pineapple, sugar, maltose, lemon juice, and salt in it — use a wide sauté pan, not a saucepan; surface area is what evaporates. Cook over medium heat, stirring more often as it thickens, 45–75 minutes. Stir in the butter in the last 5 minutes.

  3. Pull the filling at 300g. Set the pan on the scale with a folded towel between them and subtract the pan weight. At 300g it mounds on the spoon and holds a line when you drag the spoon across the pan floor. Cool completely — it firms further — then refrigerate.

  4. Beat the softened butter with the powdered sugar and salt until smooth. Beat in the yolk.

  5. Sift the cake flour and milk powder together, add with the almond flour, and mix just until it comes together. The dough is stiff and looks dry; that’s correct.

  6. Press into a 9-inch × 1-inch fluted tart pan — base first, an even 5mm, then up the sides; the batch is sized to use all of it at that thickness. Level the rim with the flat of a knife and dock the base all over with a fork. Freeze hard, 30 minutes, so the walls don’t slump.

  7. Bake at 325°F for 20–25 minutes, until set and barely colored. No weights needed — docked and frozen, it neither puffs nor shrinks.

  8. Spread the 300g of cold filling over the warm shell in an even layer and level it. Bake at 325°F for 15 minutes more, until the surface dulls and sets and the rim is golden. Tent the rim with a foil ring if it colors before the filling does.

  9. Cool completely in the pan, at least 2 hours, before unmoulding. Cut with a thin, sharp knife.

Analysis

Shell (B) — total dough: 315g

Component Amount %
Structure solids (cake flour) 130g 41.3%
Fat (butter, almond flour, milk powder, yolk) 96g 30.5%
Sugar (powdered + lactose) 43g 13.7%
Liquid (butter water, yolk water) 25g 7.9%
Protein (milk, almond, yolk) 13g 4.1%
Inert solids (almond fibre, milk minerals, salt) 8g 2.5%

Fat at 30.5% is what forces the format. Matcha shortbread runs 23.5% fat and pâte brisée 24.4%; this sits above both, at the top of the crispy-cookie band, and its 7.8% liquid is all bound water from butter and yolk — brisée has 18%, 40g of it added free. Nothing here can develop gluten, so the dough cannot be rolled and lifted into a pan. It is pressed, and pressed to 5mm rather than brisée’s 2–3mm because there is no gluten network holding the wall up. The 40g of milk powder and almond flour (13% of the dough) is where the pineapple-cake flavor lives — and the milk powder is also why the oven runs low, since lactose and milk protein brown well below the temperature plain flour needs.

Filling (A) — finished weight: 300g, from 1000g of flesh

Component Amount %
Sugar (fruit + added + maltose) 192g 64.0%
Liquid (residual water) 47g 15.7%
Fibre and other solids 37g 12.3%
Fat (butter, fruit) 18g 6.0%
Protein (fruit) 6g 2.0%

At 64% sugar this is a jam by definition, and it sets with no pectin and no starch — there is no gel, just fruit fibre with the water driven out of it. The single number that matters is the 15.7% residual water, and the reason to weigh rather than look is how fast it moves: the whole batch carries only ~253g of solids, so every 20g you overshoot the target is 20g of water. At 320g the filling is 21% water and weeps into the shell; at 280g it is under 10% and sets hard enough to crack at the cut. Judging that by eye means judging a 5-percentage-point window in a hot pan.

Notes

  • Weigh the filling; don’t judge it. 1000g of flesh reduces to 300g — 3.3:1. The Analysis has the arithmetic: 300g is a 5-percentage-point water window that a spoon cannot read. Most pineapple-cake recipes give only a description of the endpoint (“very thick and dry paste”, “dark yellow/golden”), which is why the number is worth stating; two jam recipes do publish a yield, and both are looser jams than this. Bakeomaniac gets 350g from 850g of whole pineapple — that is roughly 500g of flesh once you trim and core, so ~1.4:1 on a flesh basis, far wetter than this. What To Cook Today gets “440–500 grams” from 2kg untrimmed, about 2.5:1 on flesh. Both are spreadable tart jams; a paste that holds a cut edge in an open shell has to go further, hence 3.3:1.
  • Press, don’t roll. See the Analysis — 30.5% fat and no free water means no gluten, so this dough tears rather than stretches. It also means it will not shrink down the pan wall, which is why no weights are needed. The freeze before baking is the one step not to skip; a fridge-cold pressed wall slumps in the first ten minutes.
  • 315g of dough is a 5mm shell, not a 4mm one — the batch has no surplus. A 9-inch × 1-inch pan at 5mm holds ~320g of this dough; at 4mm, ~255g. So press to a full 5mm and use all of it, or press to 4mm and expect ~60g left over (bake it as a few cookies at 325°F for 12 minutes). What you cannot do is press thin and still finish the wall. Past 6mm the shell reads hard rather than sandy.
  • Filling depth tells you early whether the reduction was right. 300g inside a 9-inch shell is a ~5mm layer against a 25mm wall — a thin dark stratum, not a filled tart. If it looks like it will climb the wall, the filling came off the stove too wet.
  • The oven is low because of the milk powder, not the butter. Lactose and milk protein brown by Maillard well below the temperature a plain flour dough needs, so this bakes at 325°F, not 350–375°F. Published pineapple cakes agree: 320°F (Jaja Bakes, Oh My Food), 325°F (Sift & Simmer), 340°F (196 flavors). Two bakes at 325°F total ~35 minutes, which is close to a pineapple cake’s own 30.
  • The sugar is deliberately below source levels, because the format changed the ratio. A pineapple cake is roughly 2:1 dough to filling — 30g of crust around 15g of paste. This tart is 315g of dough to 300g of filling, about 1:1, so every bite carries twice the paste it would in a cake. Sources add 200–370g of sugar per kg of pineapple (196 flavors 250g per 680g of fruit; Bakeomaniac 150–200g per 850g); this adds 70, which still lands the finished paste at 64% sugar because the fruit brings ~100g of its own. Push it back toward source levels only for the tartlets below, where the 2:1 ratio returns.
  • Winter melon is the traditional filling partner, and it is optional here. It is cheap, mild, and absorbent — it stretches the pineapple and softens its acidity, which is exactly why the all-pineapple version (土鳳梨酥) reads as the premium one. To use it, replace 600g of the pineapple with 600g of peeled, seeded, grated fresh winter melon and keep everything else the same (the ratio a Taiwanese source uses is 375g pineapple to 625g melon). Candied winter-melon strips (冬瓜糖) are a different ingredient — about 60% sugar — so use 250g, chop it fine, and cut the added sugar to 20g.
  • Maltose stiffens the paste without crystallizing. Golden syrup, light corn syrup, or glucose syrup substitute 1:1. Honey works but its flavor reads through. Leaving it out gives a shorter, grainier filling that slumps at the cut edge.
  • Canned or frozen pineapple works, with two adjustments. Weigh drained flesh to 1000g, drop the added sugar to 40g (canned is packed in syrup), and expect less fibre body — the cooked-down paste will be smoother and looser, so hold to the 300g target rather than a look.
  • Tartlets restore the original ratio, and only use half the filling. Twelve in a standard muffin tin: 26g of dough pressed into each well (5mm base, wall up ~2cm) with 13g of filling — that lands back at the pineapple cake’s 2:1, uses 312g of the 315g of dough, and takes ~156g of the 300g of paste. Don’t round the dough up to 28g; twelve of those is 336g and the batch doesn’t have it. Freeze, bake 15 minutes at 325°F, fill, then 10 minutes more. Keep the rest of the paste; it holds for weeks.
  • Storage. A 64%-sugar filling keeps; the shell is what goes. Assembled, 3 days in a tin at room temperature — refrigeration softens the shortbread faster than it helps. The filling alone holds 2 weeks refrigerated or 3 months frozen, so it is worth making a double batch of it and only the shell to order.