"If you like Piña Coladas, and getting caught in the rain..."

...then you might have been disappointed by the sunny weather last Friday (10th July), but excited to have known that it was in fact National Piña Colada Day. I'm sorry not to have mentioned this important occasion in the drinks calendar in advance. While it might sound like this has been concocted purely as a marketing ploy, the piña colada is genuinely the 'national drink' of Puerto Rico, and is celebrated as such there annually on the 10th.

Elsewhere in the world though the celebrations are somewhat more commercial; had I told you about it in time, you too could have had a free Piña Colada last week - courtesy of Malibu, if you'd signed up on their pinacoladaday.co.uk website for a downloadable voucher, and joined their email mailing list. My apologies, I'm sure you're devastated to have missed out on enjoying and honouring this most sophisticated of cocktails, served up in a Malibu-branded faux-coconut cup.

But don't worry - you don't have to wait until next July to celebrate this most noble of drinks, or give away all your personal details to do so either. How so? Well, not all that long after buying the tin of bloody mary beans that featured in a previous post, I spotted this interesting-sounding tin of "Pina Colada" pineapple on the shelves of the canned fruit aisle. Was this part of a growing trend of tinned goods inspired by cocktails with an incredibly small amount of alcohol in them?

Unfortunately not - this product from Dole's Tropical Gold range (an extra sweet variety of pineapple) contains not even the faintest breath of rum - it is purely the inclusion of "Nata de Coco" which it feels entitles it to the name. Which is fair enough really, as in fact piña colada just means "strained pineapple" in Spanish, so in theory I could just get a tin of standard  pineapple chunks, pour off the juice, and call that a piña colada. But most people would expect something a little more exotic than that.

I had assumed that "nata de coco" would be coconut cream, that being the main ingredient of a piña colada cocktail, but the label elaborated that it was in fact "coconut milk gel cubes". I looked to the ingredients, expecting to find a great long list of sweeteners, gelling agents and so on to turn coconut milk into cubes, but was wrong again - they were listed simply as "coconut milk gel cubes", as if this was as natural an ingredient as the pineapple itself. Wikipedia was able to confirm this: "a chewy, translucent, jelly-like foodstuff produced by the fermentation of coconut water, which gels through the production of microbial cellulose by Acetobactor xylinum". So there you go. Yet another interesting thing I have learned through my tinned adventures.

There was no immediate sign of the still-slightly-mysterious nata de coco on opening the tin,  but diving in with a spoon brought lots of the neat little translucent cubes to the surface, alongside the bright yellow pineapple chunks. The former were very chewy, as expected - a little like the texture of a wine gum, but with slightly more bite to them. They had a much milder coconut flavour than I had been expecting, though this may have been due to the intense and, to my mind, almost sickly sweet taste of the pineapple chunks overpowering them. The cubes had however imparted a hint of coconut to the copious amount of juice in the tin.

I made things a little more cocktail-like (I use the term very loosely here) by serving up the fruit with a few spoonfuls of 'limited edition' Piña Colada flavour Müller Light yoghurt, which I had come across purely by coincidence in the supermarket. Still no actual alcohol in it, but this did at least have some rum flavouring, to give a very vague hint of the cocktail itself. A maraschino cherry is the traditional garnish, but I didn't have any, tinned or otherwise. I was however able to add a paper umbrella, for extra effect.

To be honest I actually preferred the yoghurt to the fruit, which being creamier, and more coconutty, had far more claim to the piña colada name anyway. And at least Müller bothered to include the tilde on the 'n', unlike Dole (I never knew that little squiggle was called a tilde until researching for this post - yet another thing I have learned along the way). Of course, there would be nothing to stop you adding a splash of Malibu to the contents of your tin, but I can't say that white rum is something I keep a supply of in my drinks cupboard. Plus I was trying the tin at breakfast time on a workday, so that might have been a little inappropriate anyway...