The Long-Awaited Prickly Pear Post

How long ago was it now that I mentioned harvesting prickly pears? Almost two weeks? And here I am, droning on and on about silly shingles without so much as a mention of the all-important question: Is harvesting prickly pear fruits--called, amusingly, tunas--worth it?

Well! Let me answer that in far too much detail, shall I?

Okay, so. First they had to be harvested. Every single website that talks about prickly pear fruits says you must wear gloves. The cactus itself has wicked, very noticeable spines. The fruits have impossible to see but nonetheless quite irritating tiny, hairlike little spines called glochids. If they get in your hands, they're hard to get out and very irritating.Wear the gloves, say the websites over and over again. DO NOT FORGET THE GLOVES.

I didn't have gloves. I used a corn husk from someone's tamale that had been left in a fire pit near the place we were fishing. I did get a few glochids in my fingers, but I didn't find it to be crippling or anything.

So then the websites say to either burn the glochids off or scrub them off with a stiff brush. I tried singeing them off on our propane stove burner, but I didn't have metal tongs to hold them with and the pliers on my Leatherman tool weren't long enough so I kept burning my fingers. I gave up on that after one.

I didn't have a stiff brush--are you sensing a theme of unpreparedness here?--so I did what one site recommended and tumbled them around in a bowl of warm water quite vigorously. The website said to do this before the scrubbing, but I just did it several times with fresh bowls of water each time and it seemed to take care of the glochids.

Most websites suggested peeling them by cutting off the ends, then scoring the flesh and then peeling it off. I tried this with a couple.

The ripe ones were red all the way through; the less ripe ones were green on the outside and red in the middle. Very dramatic. That's the unpeeled one at the front of the cutting board.

We tasted one of the peeled ones. It tasted, surprisingly, like a less-flavorful honeydew melon.

Peeling them was a pain in the ass, so I went with the website that said you could just puree the whole thing, skin and all, in the food processor and strain it to make juice.

I strained it through both a fine mesh strainer and cheesecloth, in case of any remaining glochids. The resulting juice was a startlingly gorgeous color, though bland.

Pretty.

I added some sugar to it, and we drank it, but honestly, the color was the most appealing part of the juice.

So was it worth it? Not to me. I certainly wouldn't go through all the effort of getting enough juice to make jelly--a common use for it--because I think the jelly would just have a one-dimensional sweet taste. The fruit has to be acidic to some degree to make good jelly, in my opinion.

Now it is true that there are different varieties of prickly pear, and maybe some of them have fruits with more flavor, but I'm not inspired to try again. It was fun to experiment with, though.

There! I feel better having gotten that posted. I'm sure you do, too.