Prickly pear juice

Prickly pear cactus in flower, May

This is easily the most blerghtastic thing I've made for ages. It's so pink there probably ought to be a law against it, but that's neither here nor there. However, it's also mucilaginous, a great word, so onomatopoeic, in that it sounds exactly as disgusting as it is.

But ... it tastes good, really good, even with no sugar added. (Unlike the fruit, which were also mucilaginous but bland and frankly a bit yucky.) Maybe I had the wrong kind of prickly pears. Maybe some things just taste better cooked.

Massed prickly pear plants on a hillside

Anyway, I have tried all sorts of peculiar foods that purport to be made from the late summer desert bounty of the cactus ... though most seem to have sugar as a key ingredient. Candy (usually a thick paste sort of like quince but less fruit and more sugar), chocolate, jelly, even popcorn. Hot sauce, powdered pink lemonade, et tedious cetera.

Unripe fruit

There are a lot of prickly pear dishes out there in the world, at least this southwestern corner of it. Many of them are beverages, and quite a few are alcoholic, such as the prickly pear martini enjoyed under maximally salubrious circumstances at Zion Lodge. My favourite actual food use so far was the syrup as a complete spur-of-the-moment garnish for green curry salmon cakes.

Harvesting with caution and tongs

I had read about making prickly pear syrup in the wonderful Hunter Gardener Angler Cook. Reader comments suggested that you can cook them without peeling, to neutralise the terrible little glochids. Well that sounds not too tricky.

Frozen juice

I always like to try making these things myself, and I had scoped out a few prickly pear plantings earlier in the year, and provided the picnic basket with a pair of tongs for harvesting. I was also keen to keep the sugar to a minimum. Apparently the juice itself isn't too bad for your blood sugar until you start getting busy with the sucrose.

Prickly pear cocktails at Zion Lodge

So Simon and I harvested about a litre and a half of fruits. All species of prickly pear fruit are edible - some are nicer than others. These had a lot of big seeds but still cooked up to a lovely colour and flavour.

To harvest, you twist the fruit with the tongs. If it comes away easily, it's ripe. Don't touch the fruit or the plants with your bare hands, because glochids. The fruit don't particularly need
refrigeration.

To cook, wash them then put in a little water - do not touch them, and try to not touch the water that washed off them, either. Cook until soft (now you can touch them if you want to). Mash with a potato masher, strain through a sieve. Cactus juice.

The next step would perhaps be to boil it with sugar to make a syrup, but I have just frozen it pending a further decision on what to do with it.

The colour is an amazing deep magenta that looks almost like blood in the hot pink container (so excited to find a full range of Sistema containers in a store up the road and for about the same price as in NZ!). The yield was about a cup of well-flavoured juice, from about 1.5 litres of fruit.