A New Ingredient: Prickly Pears
Nov 16th, 2009 | By Hank | Category: Foraging, Pheasant, Grouse, Quail | Comments | 28 Comments |
Until recently, all I knew about prickly pears was that they are the fruit of a cactus, the Sicilians eat them, and that according to Baloo, they are a bear necessity.
I’d filed them in the back of my mind to the “someday I’ll get to it” list, along with perfecting bechamel and giving a crap about edible foams. But then, about a month ago, while Holly and I were hunting deer at our friends John and Peg’s place outside Lincoln, I saw a huge patch of various species of opuntia. I asked Peg what she did with her prickly pear fruit. She gave a little pout and mumbled, “Nutin’.”
“Nutin?” I was surprised. After all Peg’s a serious food maven in the Sacramento scene: Used to run a restaurant, catering, the whole nine. I figured she’d planted them for some food reason. ”Can I use some?” Sher, Peg said, and off I went with a big garden glove and a paper bag.
I must have gathered 4-5 dozen of these little nasties, pretty but covered in vicious thorns. I smashed one to see what the inside looked like. It was a lurid, doesn’t-occur-in-nature magenta. Wow, I thought. Trippy.
I brought them home, but other things intervened and they sat in my fridge in that paper bag for nearly a month. First lesson learned: Prickly pears store really well in the fridge.
I brought them out because I wanted to reduce them to a syrup and then use that syrup for a variety of things. But first I needed to get these little flavor grenades out of their spiky skins. Second lesson learned: It’s not the big, seemingly vicious spines you need to worry about. It’s the hairlike “glochids,” which cover the fruit, that you need to worry about. Hated, evil glochids. Even the name sounds like some monster in a George Romero film.
With much cursing, I sliced off the skins and dropped the magenta centers into a bowl. I later learned that I was supposed to torch the pears briefly, which burns off the glochids. My friends Elise and Garrett have a method for skinning prickly pears that works well, too.
Once skinned, you now need to separate the seeds from the pulp. Garrett and several others say the seeds are edible, but they are either high or have far stronger teeth than I do; it’s like eating a wood chip. Now I’ve dealt with removing seeds for a syrup before, no time worse than with the fig syrup. Fortunately prickly pear seeds are about 100 times larger than fig seeds, so this step was no biggie.
I buzzed them in a blender, then through a food mill with the coarse die — just large enough to block the seeds. You could stop here, but I am something of a fanatic when it comes to clarity; I developed this particular neurosis from making wine. So I passed the pulpy juice through a fine-meshed sieve and then through cheesecloth.
After that, I added an equal volume of sugar and brought it to a simmer to thicken a little. Prickly pears are loaded with vitamin C, and this is a vitamin that’s destroyed by heat, so I wanted to limit the heat as much as possible. Once the sugar was good and dissolved, I turned off the heat and added some citric acid.
Why? Third lesson learned: Prickly pears, which taste like a combination of bubble gum, watermelon and strawberries, are totally lacking in tartness. Without acid, they are not very tasty. Why citric acid? I wanted a neutral acid, not lemon juice. They’re close, but not the same. Lemons bring other flavors to the party, and I wanted this to be prickly pear’s show.
The result? Pure magenta power.
(Click for the full prickly pear syrup recipe.)
This stuff rocks. The citric acid gives it just the right tang, and it brings out the watermelon-bubblegum elements and holds the color; it’s also a good preservative so I will be able to play with this stuff for a while.
My initial thoughts? Mixed with tequila, of course. Cactus and Cactus. Duh!
I also drizzled a little on a plate with a slice from a torchon of foie gras Chef Michael Tuohy gave me as a parting gift after last week’s Duck Off. The combination of foie and prickly pear syrup is divine.
After those two experiments, I figured I may make a sorbet, a vinaigrette for a salad, a souffle, or a glaze for a game bird. Oh wait, I did that.
Allow me to present to you one of the best pheasants I’ve ever cooked.
OK, I need to tell you that the reason was only partly because of the prickly pear glaze. The real reason was that I had hung the bird for nearly four days before I froze it, then brined it for 12 hours. Oh yeah, and it was a pen-raised bird, so it had a lot of fat. And I got lucky and cooked it perfectly. The glaze was literally the icing on the cake. Or the pheasant, in this case.
Here is the full glazed pheasant recipe, and keep in mind it works just fine with a regular chicken, and with other glazes such as maple syrup, honey or another fruit syrup.
Getting the glaze to actually caramelize was the trick. I needed to roast the bird an extra 30 minutes to do it, something that might be tricky with a real wild pheasant. I’ll need to play with this a bit.
What’s the takeaway? Stretch a bit. I’d ignored prickly pears as outside my area of interest; they were Mexican, a cuisine I leave to Holly. They are something Bobby Flay might use in one of his hallucinogenic plating designs. They were hard to find.
This last bit was the must amusing self-delusion. Once I realized this was good food — and I have not even ventured into nopales, which is the actual cactus pad itself — I began seeing prickly pear cacti everywhere. I see one on the side of Highway 50 on my way to work every day. I even hear they live in decidedly non-cacti friendly areas like Montana.
I know I will keep using prickly pears, if only as a glaze for game birds or a mixer for tequila on a hot day. I also know many of you have far more experience with this ingredient. What do you use it for?
MORE ON PRICKLY PEARS
- An Italian prickly pear drink, from Ilva at Lucullian Delights
- More on Italian uses of prickly pears, by Bleeding Espresso
- Making Prickly Pear Lemonade, from the Tucson Cactus Society
This is amazing. I grew up deer hunting in South Texas where were surrounded by prickly pears but never once thought of doing anything with them. If I ever get a chance to go again and collect some cacti, I’m coming back to you for recipes!
For the benefit of your readers, I must add that the prickly pear margarita was DIVINE, once I got over the fact that it resembled magenta antifreeze. That stuff is quite fluourescent… But yeah, I got over that pretty quickly. YUM!
OMG, those fine hairs are indeed the devil. We had an 8 foot prickly pear that produces lots and lots of fruit and god forbid you touch one of those things sans a heavy glove. As for what else to do – me thinks a prickly pear mojito would be awesome.
That’s really cool. I’m sure I can find some (place that ships) if I look hard enough….I have an inkling that I’d love to have some of this!
A friend of mine fell into a prickly pear patch once, while wearing shorts and little else… He still winces after 60 years.
When I read that you thought they were hard to find, my head shook. But, I remember that we come from different places.
I grew up on candied tunas, “tunas” being the Mexican word for them (probably Spanish, but having married a Nicaraguan, I’ve found out that many of my “spanish” words are Mexican).
Perhaps you should grow one – you can get nopales out of them, too, which I love.
About glazes, my elderberry jam is tart (in a good way), and I’m thinking of making it a glaze for a turkey. Suggestions?
Ugh, I grew up in Southern California and my mom made jam from prickly pears. So when I was a kid I was tasked with diving in and picking them in the enormous cactus forest that was our back yard. The painful, itchy memories kind of put me off them for about 20 years. But a year or two ago I bought some in the store and made a Prickly Pear Cranberry Sauce for Thanksgiving, which turned out fairly well. I do like the watermellony-ness of them, and yeah, great with Tequila.
Is it possible that the Chef Michael Tuohy you mention the gentleman who had a resto in Atlanta called Woodfire Grille? If so, when next you see him, please advise we miss him quite a lot. He is a lovely man.
I love making things out of prickly pears. I live on an island so badly wrecked its one of the few wild edibles we can collect. Recently we have discovered a new way to pick and process them.
Before picking the fruits we make a brush out of dead grass and brush all of the spines from the fruit and the pick with a gloved hand. or some of us prefer to pick with bbq tongs and then gently roll them in the grass to remove the spines. (like the island foxes do) If you collect the fruits with out first removing the spines you risk getting spines stuck in other fruits in your bag.
To process the prickly pear fruits, we first wash them to remove any remaining glochids, and then peel the skin off with a knife. (If you use a towel to remove the nodes on the fruit, you may eat the skin too.)
The secret we seem to have discovered is then to slice the fruits in half length wise and scoop out the seeds and dark pulp into a bowl, and then also reserve the flesh of the fruit that was between the dark centers and the outer skin.
The juice is removed from the seeds by cooking briefly and then straining through cheese cloth to remove the seeds.
Then you have too separate parts to work with, a dark sweet rich juice from the centers and and a bright tart flesh.
Recently we have made cobblers with the tart flesh, and frozen the juice into ice cubes– and slowly used the cubes to make smoothies, home-made candy, and a syrup for coconut flan.
Jay: Definitely go do that — bet prickly pears would go well with venison.
LiveToHunt: Mojito, eh? Meaning mint and prickly pear? Worth a try.
Amy: They may grow near you. You never know…
Kyle: Holy crap! I can only imagine.
Josh: I tossed all the seeds into my front yard, so if a cactus grows, so be it. As for the elderberry glaze on turkey, yeah. it’ll work, but to me it seems to dark and heavy for turkey. Better for duck or goose. Do something lighter for the turkey.
Susan: Yep, same Michael Tuohy. I will pass on your message!
Vyki: Wow. Nice tutorial. Definitely makes me more eager to pick another batch of prickly pears knowing a better way to avoid the spines. Oh, and I love that the foxes figured this out, too!
I love making Prickly Pear wine every year (I made prickly pear fruit and dandelion flower wine this year), and I’ve made a fair amount of Prickly Pear cordials too, this year I made a prickly pear and wild rose tequila cordial with desert wildflower honey that was just barely sweet and very flavorful.
We also de-stickerize the fruit and dry them to use in tea.
We also make a similar glaze to yours with prickly pear, juniper berries, spices etc Prickly pear, depending on how long you cook it down etc can be quite light and berry like, and I’ve found it to very nice for wild turkey.
Josh: Let the record note that I gave Hank the evil eye for tossing those seeds in the front yard, right by the front door, you know, because it’ll make such a great welcome plant.
Hank-
In Lebanon, prickly pears are a very popular refreshing fruit. It is peeled and served chilled, just like watermelon. I love it’s melon/berry taste. BTW, the seeds are edible, but not “chewable”. I know this makes no sense, but I would eat the fruit whole and simply swallow the seeds. They are supposed to aid digestion (not sure if that is true). Others suck on the pulp and simply spit the seeds out.
Thank you for the idea of adding pure citric acid. I could not get my first batch of PP syrup to taste the way I wanted it to, and will try your recipe when I attempt my next batch.
And there is just no way to properly describe the evil of the glochids. A horrid cluster of micro-pains which gel together into finger-tip-burning awfulness.
On a recent trip to Albuquerque, I harvested a bunch of prickly pears from a giant cactus growing in front of an office building (the people on their cigarette break looked at me like I was crazy). I washed off the glochids (after discovering their presence the hard way), cut them in half, scooped out the flesh, and ran it through a sieve.
When I asked New Mexicans what to do with the juice, they all said “Margaritas!” But I’m thinking of cooking it down and making a quince/prickly pear preserve. Northeast meets Southwest.
I’ve enjoyed everything from nopalitos on a salad to prickly pear liqeur, and I think they’re a wonderful thing.
But I wouldn’t want the bloody things in my yard. They WILL take over!
I’ve a funny (now, not then) story about a young guy who looks a lot like me and has the same name, who once set a squirrel trap and sat under a pine tree to wait for his quarry. Unbeknownst to the boy, under the pine tree was a nice little patch of prickly pear, barely covered by a mound of pine needles. Under the sadistic ministrations of his grandmother, we learned yet another use for duct tape!
Not high in the slightest. Most likely. Probably. Depends on when you catch me.
Anyways, love the idea of adding citric acid. I usually just toss in a squeeze of lime juice but I’m sure your way keeps the flavor pure and bubblegum like. As for the thorns? Heavy gloves and the use of fire takes them out pretty quickly. =)
When I was a young boy living and traveling in Mexico, we ate cactus tunas to such a degree that it caused me some panic when I urinated a brilliant magenta colour!
Thanks for the mention…that pheasant looks truly divine!
I have a NJ Italian friend who transplanted himself to Tucson, AZ. He makes a great prickly pear mead.
Can’t believe I missed this one. I carry a Sicilian prickly pear jam. As far as I know, I’m the only online retailer to carry it.
[...] excellent post from there is this: Prickly Pears. We in the southwest know these delightful plants. The main paddle of that cactus is a good food [...]
I was so moved by your last post that I couldn’t respond. Glad to see you’re back in the saddle. FANTASTIC POST! And the comments were such a great addition as well! I may have inspired a whole new herd of foragers with this post alone. Thanks!
I use a blow torch, the kind with a propane bottle. Go over the the fruit first and then pick. Saves a lot of time and not getting stuck so often.
Kevin: Great idea, although I can imagine the looks I’d get wandering into an arid place with a blowtorch looking for cactus fruit. Might be worth it just for the chance of getting arrested…
Prickly pears are excellent with cucumber (in a frozen blender drink with lemon and mint, or chopped together in a light “fruit” salad with honeydew and a citrus vinaigrette).
Mint is generally a good addition, or sage if you’re going savory.
I tried making a cactus pear and lemon verbena jelly a few years back, but cooked it too long and lost a lot of the “good” flavors. I’ll try again someday.
I went fishing for prickly pears last fall with my family, picking the fruit with a homemade contraption of a long pole attached to a can. After we picked a few piles we removed the glochids by threshing them with weeds and then later at home washing them down with a strong stream of water. I made prickly pear pie with them, flavored with almonds.
I agree with you that the syrup which I made from it (mine was orange and not magenta) was cloyingly sweet. Next time I will add lemon juice to it as you recommend. Thanks for the ideas.
Out here, prickly pears only grow on beach dunes…I’ve eaten them carefully with a knife, but with this knowledge in hand I look forward to doing something more useful with them!
I’m in my 5th year of growing/preparing elderberries. Made wine in 2008 – very bitter! But as it turns out, a PERFECT marinade for any red meat or wild game.