Nopales Tacos

Nopales tacos are a thing in Mexico, as well as here in the United States. Nopales are the tender young cactus paddles from the prickly pear, and in these tacos, I’m serving them as carne con nopales, a thick stew of meat, chiles and cactus. It’s a great way to get to know this crunchy, tart and nutritious vegetable.

Nopales, pronounced “no-PAHL-es,” are popular all over Mexico, and have been eaten there since antiquity. The paddles, stripped of their many spines, are high in vitamins and minerals, and can help lower blood sugar.

Chances are if you are making nopales tacos, you’ll start with pre-cleaned cactus, which are available in most Latin markets and in some larger supermarkets.

But if you’re starting with paddles right off the plant, here’s a video on how to clean nopales. My recipe calls for pre-cooked nopales, and I’ll go over that in the instructions below, but there are lots of options for prepping them; I go over a bunch of ways to cook nopales without their inherent slime here.

The filling for these nopales tacos is my rendition of carne con nopales, meat with cactus paddles. It’s pretty straightforward, and is an amalgam of a few recipes I make on the regular.

First, you boil the nopales with a pinch of baking soda to remove the slime, known as babas in Mexico. You add that to ground meat — any meat works, although I used ground venison here — and then mix in one batch of my fire-roasted salsa.

Let it all cook down until it’s not too soupy — you don’t want it too wet or it will break your tortillas — and serve simply, with just some cheese and cilantro, maybe a hit of lime.

If you want to make this vegetarian, you can leave out the meat, or, better yet, sauté some roughly chopped mushrooms and add that to the mix.

I prefer homemade corn tortillas with nopales tacos, but you could use flour tortillas, too.

If you want to make this a cactus feast, I’d add either a cactus salad or nopales en escabeche, a cool pickled nopales recipe that you could also put in your tacos.