Prickly Pear Juice Making

Today was my first foray into making food with a part of a cactus!  Here in AZ and in many other arid climates, the Prickly Pear cactus grows everywhere.  It is used as a landscape plant in people's yards as well as in public spaces. The fruit of the Prickly Pear is a bright red and often called a tuna.  The pads of the prickly pear are called nopalito.  Both of these are often found in the stores here in Phoenix, but when buy it when you can pick it for free from your yard?

Both fruits and pads of the prickly pear cactus are rich in slowly absorbed soluble fibers that may help keep blood sugar stable.  However, I suspect that after I make this yummy juice into a syrup, it won't be so blood sugar friendly!

Here's a quick step by step description of the process:

Pick the tunas when they are really red to ensure they are ripe.  There is a short window of time before the birds start to get them so keep watch on your cactus plant! Bring them into the house to wash them and scrub off the clusters of fine, tiny, barbed spines called glochids.   We used a stiff vegetable brush to scrub them and held on to them with a tong.

There is no boiling or cooking involved in this process!

After they are washed, put several in a blender (a food processor would probably work, too) with just a little water and give it a good whirl to pulverize them into a pulp.  We didn't even bother to cut them into smaller pieces, we just let the blender do the work!  Looks really pretty doesn't it?  At this point the seeds and any other small spines still remain, so it is important to strain this through cheese cloth.

This pulpy substance will be too thick to strain through the cloth on its own, so you will need to squeeze it through the cloth,  This was the messy part.  It is best to use a colander to further strain out any seeds and of course you need a bowl or pitcher to catch the juice!

That's all there is to making the Prickly Pear tuna into juice.  Now I can further process it into syrups, jellies and then use that for all kinds of things like candy, cocktails, lemonade, smoothies and whatever else my imagination dreams up!

Here's a trivia fact for you - The Prickly Pear Cactus is the state plant of Texas!

What is your favorite way to use Prickly Pear Syrup??

The Garden Goddess,
http://www.down2earthgardens.com/