Pineapple, Coal-Roasted and Brûléed

El Toro Loco in Miami serves this alongside a properly fatty Wagyu steak, and it’s one of the best sides I’ve had anywhere. Pineapple roasted over hardwood coals, then fanned out in half-moons across the plate, dusted with cinnamon sugar, and brûléed. Amazing.

It works because it is doing a specific job. A rich, fatty cut coats your palate, and after a few bites everything starts tasting the same. Hot acidic fruit cuts straight through that, and the bitter edge of the burnt sugar resets it completely. This is the reason Brazilian steakhouses have passed grilled pineapple between meat courses for as long as they’ve existed — it isn’t dessert, it’s a palate cleanser that happens to taste like dessert.

El Toro Loco’s version refines the tradition rather than inventing it. In a rodízio the pineapple comes around on the skewer it was grilled on and gets carved onto your plate. Here it’s cut down into half-moons, arranged, and given a proper brûlée crust — plated as a side rather than passed as an interlude.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Miami. I grew up wintering in Key Largo and summering in Ludington, Michigan, so South Florida food has been in my life a long time — the Cuban and the Brazilian especially, and in Miami they’re everywhere. This is the dish I keep thinking about afterward.

The method below is my reconstruction of what they’re doing. The technique is not a secret, but the exact sugar ratio and the wood are mine, not theirs.

Ingredients

• The pineapple
• 1 ripe pineapple
• 2 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted (optional — see Directions)
• Cinnamon sugar
• 1/2 cup demerara or turbinado sugar (the coarse crystals matter — see Notes)
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon

Pinch of flaky salt

• For the brûlée crust
• 2 to 3 Tbsp additional demerara sugar
• Fire
• Hardwood lump charcoal — oak, hickory, or a fruitwood

Directions

Key ingredients

Cinnamon · Salt

1. Pick a ripe one — this is most of the outcome:
2. The fruit should smell sweet at the base, give slightly under your thumb, and have gone gold rather than green up the sides. An underripe pineapple is aggressively sour and no amount of sugar rescues it; the grill concentrates what’s already there rather than adding sweetness. → photo 1
3. Build a hardwood fire:
4. Lump charcoal, not briquettes — you want clean smoke and real heat. Let it burn down to glowing coals with a light ash coat. Medium-high, hand held five seconds above the grate. A gas grill works and the dish is still good, but the smoke is genuinely part of it. → photo 2
5. Cut it:
6. Top and base off. Stand it up and cut the skin away in strips, following the curve, going deep enough to take most of the eyes. Then quarter it lengthwise and cut out the woody core from each quarter.
7. Roast it as quarter-length spears, not rings or chunks — long pieces on the grate are easier to turn, and you slice them into half-moons afterward.
8. Mix the cinnamon sugar:
9. Demerara, cinnamon, and a pinch of flaky salt. The salt isn’t traditional and it isn’t optional for me — it keeps the whole thing from reading as candy.
10. Roast:
11. Lay the spears on the grate. Brush with melted butter if you like — it helps color and encourages the crust, though the fruit has enough sugar to caramelize on its own.
12. Turn every 3–4 minutes to get all three faces, about 12–15 minutes total. You want deep grill marks and edges that have gone translucent and begun to slump. Keep going a little past where you’d think — the flesh must actually soften, and firm grilled pineapple with a scorched surface is the common failure.
13. Dust generously with the cinnamon sugar in the last 3–4 minutes, once per turn, so it melts on rather than burning. Sugar on a hot grate from the start just carbonizes. → photo 3
14. Slice and arrange:
15. Off the fire, cut each spear crosswise into half-moons about 1/2 inch thick. Fan them across the plate in an overlapping arc — the arrangement is part of the dish, and it also gives you a broad flat surface for the torch.
16. Brûlée:
17. Sprinkle the additional demerara evenly over the arranged half-moons and hit it with a kitchen torch until it melts, bubbles, and goes deep amber. Keep the flame moving; hold it in one place and you get carbon, not caramel.
18. No torch? Run it under a preheated broiler on the top shelf for 1–2 minutes, watching the whole time. It’s less controlled and the fruit warms more, but it works.
19. Serve immediately:
20. The crust starts softening from the fruit’s moisture within a few minutes. This is the one step you cannot do ahead — and it should go out hot, next to the steak, not after it.

Notes

What’s mine and what’s theirs

The dish is El Toro Loco’s and the description is what I ate: pineapple roasted over hardwood coals, arranged in half-moons, cinnamon sugar, brûléed. The ratios, the salt, the demerara, and the wood choice are mine — I have not seen their recipe and did not ask. Treat this as a faithful reconstruction of a technique, not a copy of a formula.

Why demerara and not white sugar

The coarse crystals are the entire reason this works. Fine white sugar dissolves into the fruit’s surface moisture and turns to syrup before it can caramelize, so you get a wet sweet film instead of a crust. Demerara and turbinado hold their shape long enough to melt as a layer and set into glass. It’s the same reason a crème brûlée is finished with coarse sugar.

The cinnamon goes in the grill dusting, not the brûlée sugar. Cinnamon scorches at a lower temperature than sucrose caramelizes, and a torched cinnamon layer tastes acrid. Sugar alone on top.

Where the dish comes from

Grilled pineapple — abacaxi — is a churrascaria fixture, and in a true rodízio it isn’t a side at all. It’s carried around on the skewer it was grilled on and carved onto your plate between meat courses, as a palate cleanser: sweet and acidic against the salt and fat, so the fifth cut tastes like the first. It’s also frequently what closes the meal, once you’ve waved off the meat.

That tradition sits inside churrasco, the gaucho cooking of the southern Brazilian plains — beef over open fire with coarse salt and time, no sauce, no marinade. The pineapple belongs to the same logic: whole fruit, live fire, one seasoning.

El Toro Loco’s change is to plate it as a side with a brûlée crust rather than pass it on the skewer. That’s a steakhouse refinement of a rodízio custom, and pairing it with Wagyu specifically makes the palate-cleanser logic even more pointed, since Wagyu is the fattiest thing on the menu.

About El Toro Loco

A Miami churrascaria that started as a food truck in 2014 and grew into multiple locations across Miami-Dade — Little Havana, Kendall, Westchester, Tamiami, the Hammocks, Doral, Pinecrest. Chef Aldo Espinosa. They run several Wagyu varieties alongside the usual rodízio cuts, and the grilled pineapple with cinnamon turns up in customer reviews next to the dry-aged Wagyu ribeye — which is exactly how I had it.

⚠ Locations open and close; check which branch is trading before driving across town.

Variations

• Cachaça or dark rum, brushed on in the last minutes of grilling. Very much in the Brazilian idiom and it deepens the caramel.
• A little chili — cayenne or ancho in the cinnamon sugar. Sweet-hot against fat is a Miami move as much as a Brazilian one.
• Whole, on the rotisserie, the way a churrascaria actually does it: peeled whole, skewered, dusted with cinnamon sugar, turned over the fire, and shaved off in strips as the outside caramelizes. More spectacle, and better if you’re feeding a crowd.
• Lime over the finished half-moons. Not traditional; sharpens it further if your steak is very rich.

Serving

It’s a side, not a dessert, and it belongs on the plate with the steak — that’s the whole point. If you serve it afterward you’ve turned it into a fruit course and lost the job it was doing.

It goes with anything fatty and salt-crusted: picanha above all, ribeye, short rib, pork belly. Not worth it with a lean cut — there’s nothing for it to cut through.