Prickly Pear Syrup

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Close up of prickly pears
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

Well into my adulthood, 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 when I moved to California I saw them everywhere. Prickly pears are a common landscaping plant, one I’ve taken to growing in my own yard. They come in all sizes and colors, ranging from teeny to larger than an orange. The larger ones are worth eating as a fruit, but the little ones are best for prickly pear syrup, which is what I first made with this fantastic cactus fruit.

The first time I brought some home, life intervened and they sat in my fridge in that paper bag for nearly a month. Apparently prickly pears store really well in the fridge.

To make a syrup, you need 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 the pulp 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.

Close up of prickly pears
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

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 mostly lacking in tartness. An exception is the variety the Mexicans call xoconostle. Without tartness, fruit is 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.

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.

My initial use: Mixed with tequila, of course. Cactus and Cactus. Duh! After that obligatory start, I made a sorbet, a vinaigrette for a salad, a souffle, and a glaze for game birds.

pheasant prickly pear glaze
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

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.

What’s the takeaway? Stretch a bit. Expand your horizons and work with new flavors. Some, like this one, will become new staples for your personal kitchen.

[recipe_name]Prickly Pear Syrup[/recipe_name]

prickly pear syrup recipe
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

[summary]This is a pretty standard syrup recipe, but using the brilliant magenta fruits of the prickly pear cactus as the fruit. Commercial versions of this syrup are used for fancy margaritas or are poured over pancakes; two excellent ideas.

I strongly advise you to buy citric acid for this recipe. You can often find it in the canning aisle of the supermarket under names like “Fruit Fresh” and the like. You can also buy it at homebrew supply stores. Prickly pears lack any sort of acid tang and need something to keep them from being insipid. Lemons work fine, but I want base ingredients like a syrup to be pure in flavor.

This recipe is a guide: Prickly pears come in all sizes and sweetness levels, so use your taste buds and common sense. My pears were small, mostly about the size of limes. And they were sweet, but not overly so.[/summary]

[yield]Makes 1 quart of syrup.[/yield]

Prep Time:[preptime time=45M] 45 minutes[/preptime]

Cook Time:[cooktime time=30M] 30 minutes[/cooktime]

  • [ingredient] [amount]5 pounds[/amount] [item]prickly pears[/item] [/ingredient]
  • [ingredient] [amount]3 cups[/amount] [item]sugar[/item][/ingredient]
  • [ingredient] [amount]1 tablespoon[/amount] [item]citric acid[/item] or the juice of 2 lemons[/ingredient]

[instructions]

  1. After the pears have been peeled, puree them in a food processor. There will be lots of seeds that you’ll need to filter out. For a clear syrup, push everything through a coarse food mill grate or colander — something just large enough to catch the seeds. Take your time and get all the pulp you can. Now run the pulp and juice through a fine mesh sieve. If you really want to get fancy, run the sieved juice through cheesecloth. This is what I did. You should have about 3 cups of juice. Pour this in a heavy pot and add the sugar — whatever your juice volume is, add that much sugar.
  2. Bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Let it simmer for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and let it cool for 15 minutes. Add the lemon juice or citric acid. Add a little at a time and taste it. Stop adding when it is tart enough for you.
  3. Pour while still hot into clean Mason jars and seal. This should keep for months in the fridge, or you could probably process it in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes and keep it in the pantry; the citric acid helps preserve the syrup.

[/instructions]

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About Hank Shaw

Hey there. Welcome to Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, the internet’s largest source of recipes and know-how for wild foods. I am a chef, author, and yes, hunter, angler, gardener, forager and cook. Follow me on Instagram and on Facebook.

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35 Comments

  1. CAUTION!!! Prickly pear and nopales are a serious food allergen. I love experimenting with new food and keeping it fresh and close to the source but you need to make sure people know what they are eating. My 3yr old daughter watched me almost die of anaphylactic shock this weekend because the host at a party served salsa with nopales and I didn’t think to ask. Sorry to be a downer, but I want to make sure you have full information. Thanks!

  2. Drink of choice? Prosecco and prickly pear syrup! Beautiful and refreshing. The best wild pork we ever ate came after a year that yielded a bumper crop of cactus pears. The wild pigs couldn’t get enough…to the extent that their insides were tinted magenta! The meat was actually flavored by the cactus pears. Fabulous and Lovely.

  3. you got it all backwards! You don’t peel them at all. You vigorously steam them from the get go. That softens and dissolves the prickly fur rendering and thorns and pricks harmless. Once steamed (25 Min) you chesse cloth squeeze or press the fruit manually thru a mesh filter such as a sifter screen used for flour or a strainer. extracting all the liquid juice which you then add a concentrated solution of sugar water to , in order to make the sweetened fruit syrup.The prickly pear fruit is not naturally sweet tasting.

  4. I’m a native Arizonan, and watched my Grandmother make prickly pear jelly growing up. I’ve been making it for years as well, and would like to offer my gathering and cooking techniques. First of all, heavy leather gloves and tongs are critical to gathering. I use plastic buckets or empty 20 lb dog food bags to gather them. Once picked, I’ved found the best way to remove the spines and many of the glochids is to torch them! I have a metal screen used for screening rocks; we put a single layer of pears on the screen, use a propane torch to burn off the spines, still using gloves. Once you’ve torched the whole group, roll them and continue torching until you’ve torched all sides of the pears. Don’t handle them without gloves though, because there are hidden pricklies still. I then pour them into a big pot, cover it with water and cook them at a low boil for about an hour, then use a potato masher to squash the fruit and bring out the juice. I handle about 20 lbs at a time, so smaller batches may take less time. Strain the juice to remove skins and seeds, and then simmer the juice uncovered until it has a nice rich flavor. Then you can use that juice to make syrup or jelly, and it’s fabulous!!!!

  5. I have tried your recipe and it works well. I have a plant in my yard that yields about 5 gals of juice per season. I make both prickly pear syrup and jelly. To the person who didn’t like the sliminess- I have only run into that one season. I had let the fruits stay on the plants an extra month before picking them, wondering how long they would stay on without dropping off. That year, they were slimy. I live in Georgia and it seems that the end of September is the best time to pick them. I have one or two that have just started turning purple. I have people from Mexico, Israel and Jordan that have stopped by to ask if they can buy some from me. I also sell the plants so that people can grow/harvest their own. I just cut off the palms and stick them in soil and they are rooted within a month. The palms grow back as fast as I can use them.
    I also gather the acorns from the huge oak tree I have, crush them and make flour… Acorn pancakes with prickly pear syrup…does it get any better than that?!

  6. I missed the ball on harvesting the fruit before a deep freeze – they are now a little shriveled. Since this recipe is for syrup and the consistency of the fruit isn’t part of the end product – do you think I could still use the frozen fruits to make syrup?

  7. was this stringy,slimey like okra for anyone else? ? ? great taste but off-putting with the stringy-ness. :/

  8. Sounds like a good syrup recipe, but man that is a lot of pricklys to pick. I just wanted to add that with, what, fifty seeds in each pear, they are edible. You can grind them into flour, though not gluten-producing flour. But hey with pectin in the fruits and flour from the seeds, you can make cactus pie 🙂

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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… 😉

  13. 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.

  14. 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!

  15. 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.