San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The culinary magic of prickly pear.
Prickly pear’s magic goes beyond margaritas
Like their name implies, prickly pears can be a thorny fruit to deal with. They’re covered in tiny needles, chock-full of hard seeds and their juice can stain everything it touches a shocking magenta color.
But prickly pears are also delicious, they’re one of the easiest native fruits to forage in Texas, and they are coming into season right now. They have a terrific fruity flavor with vegetal hints that can add a lot of impact to cocktails, smoothies or just about any other drink. But they’re also great to eat on their own, and they’re nutritional powerhouses to boot, with oodles of antioxidants, vitamin C, minerals like magnesium and more.
The first thing to know is what the heck prickly pears actually are. They go by a slew of names including cactus pear, tuna, Indian fig, Barbary fig, xoconostle (which is a sour variety) and more, but they’re all the fruit from about 90 different species of the Opuntia cactus, which also has edible paddles often sold as nopales.
You can find prickly pears in a wide range of colors, both in stores and in the wild. The most dramatic and easiest to find in the San Antonio area has a deep magenta skin and interior color to match. Others may be green, yellow or orange on the outside with interior colors that are a solid light green, yellowish on the edges with a red core, or a solid yellowish to orange
throughout the interior. The texture in a perfectly ripe fruit will be somewhat like a soft watermelon with a scattering of hard seeds throughout.
Cookbook author, blogger and South Texas food expert Melissa Guerra (kitchenwrangler.com) adds the puree of the fruit to margaritas, lemonade, smoothies and more.
“You couldn’t have anything more indicative of the flavor of South Texas,” she said. “They really are incredibly delicious with a beautiful fruity flavor that has notes of rose and berries.”
Harvesting the prickly pears is something of a battle for her. At her Rio Grand Valley cattle ranch, she routinely fights with mockingbirds, javelinas and other beasties to collect the fruit before they can steal them all.
When to harvest prickly pears
While many San Antonio-area grocery stores stock at least one type of prickly pear year-round, they grow in abundance in San Antonio-area parks and neighborhood landscapes — many of us have at least one Opuntia cactus growing in our yard — and they are easy to harvest with a little know-how.
“Their edibility really depends on where they are growing in the climate of Texas,” Guerra said. “What you need to know first is are they fresh and are they in good condition?”
Guerra said the right time to harvest prickly pears is when the fruits first start to ripen, generally the first few weeks of September in San Antonio and a little earlier in her hotter part of the state. Around here, most of them will fully turn a deep red when ripe.
Even if the variety you find has green, yellow or orange fruits, they should all look plump and full. In perfectly ripe prickly pears, many of the tiny hairlike needles will just have started to fall off.
If prickly pears stay on the plant too long — basically after the first two weeks of ripening — they’ll still look ripe, but they’ve spent too much time baking in the scorching Texas sun and won’t be any good to eat. Good indicators for the ripeness of wild fruits are seeing marks from birds pecking on them and seeing a little juice dribble out when plucked from the cactus. Avoid any that have started to shrivel or wrinkle.
How to harvest prickly pears
Guerra recommends using metal utensils to pull the fruit off and metal containers to collect it, as the tiny spines will stick in plastic and wood making them
much harder to clean. Metal tongs can easily get the job done as ripe prickly pears will require little more than a twist and a tug to pluck off the cactus.
How to peel prickly pears
Whether you’ve bought them at the store or picked them yourself, once you’ve got the prickly pears in the kitchen is when the real knowledge is required.
“Not everybody knows what to do with the foods of South Texas,” Guerra said. “Let us never forget Gerald Ford once ate a tamal with the husk on.”
Guerra’s method for peeling prickly pears is fast, efficient and won’t leave your fingers full of needles.
Step one is to lay the fruit on its side and stab it with a fork — again, all the tools should be metal here — so you have a way to hold it in place without touching the skin as you work. Use a sharp knife to slice off the ends. Now, make a shallow slice just through the skin from end to end. Keep the fruit stable with the fork and use your knife to carefully peel the skin away from the point of incision, adjusting your anchor point with the fork as needed. The skin will come off easily from a ripe fruit and won’t require cutting so much as gently pulling it off with the knife.
While the prickly pears are full of seeds, they can be eaten as-is once peeled. Just be careful to not bite down on the seeds as they’re quite hard. They’re safe to swallow, or you can spit them out if desired.
How to make prickly pear puree
When you see prickly pear drinks or syrups on a menu, it’s usually from a puree of the fruit.
To make a puree, Guerra suggests placing the peeled fruits in a blender and blending until they’re smoothly pureed. The seeds are hard and will remain intact while blending, but don’t worry, they won’t damage the blades.
Place a strainer — it doesn’t have to be fine mesh, just small enough to catch the seeds — over a large bowl. Pour the puree into the strainer and use a spatula or spoon to press down on the puree and force all of the pulp through, keeping the seeds behind. The results will be fairly smooth and watery, and that pulp can go directly into smoothies, ice pops, margaritas and more if you like. Unused pulp can be stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to a week.
How to make prickly pear simple syrup
You can also use that pulp to make a prickly pear simple syrup perfect for adding a splash of Texas to just about any dish or drink you like. Many of us are used to encountering the dramatic color of prickly pear swirled into a frozen margarita.
To make the syrup, add 1 cup of strained prickly pear pulp, 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar to a saucepan and bring that to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and let the mixture simmer, uncovered, for about 20 minutes, or until reduced by about a third. Strain it again through a sieve lined with a fine-mesh cloth. Store the syrup in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.