08/18/2017 A Taste of the Wild: From Tuna to Table

08/18/2017 – A Taste of the Wild:  From Tuna to Table (Karen Benson)

It is late summer and the prickly pear fruits are beginning to ripen.  The clumps of spiny, green pads are starting to wear halos of purple, spiny “tunas.”  And, although “spiny” is the operative word here, the wild creatures are eagerly awaiting this bounty.

Animals with tough lips and mouths eat the fruits without noticing the prickles.  I can see how a Texas Tortoise can disregard the spines and prickles as a tortoise has a tough, horn-like jaw, but how do Javelinas bite into prickly pears?  Maybe the taste is so good, that they ignore the minor pain of eating these fruits.

I personally cannot ignore the spines and those tiny little bristles called “glochids” that prickly pear cacti bear.  There are several species in the genus Opuntia and all of them have one to ten needlelike spines per areole (little rosettes on the pads) AND hundreds of barbed glochids in the areoles and at the joints.  The glochids are so small that you might not see them at first.  But you will feel them!  You need a magnifier and fine tweezers to extract them from tender flesh.

It is no wonder that I have had little inclination to eat prickly pears in my life.  However, during a recent trip to the Grand Canyon National Park, I sampled the quintessential Southwestern breakfast at the park’s famous lodge.  It was a stack of pancakes, three different kinds:  buttermilk, blue cornmeal, and buckwheat.  The pancakes were served with pistachio-flavored butter and topped with prickly pear syrup.  The syrup was a beautiful fuchsia purple and it had a delicate flavor unlike any other fruit.  It was a glorious breakfast!  I resolved to try to make my own prickly pear syrup someday.

That someday arrived recently when my husband noticed the tunas were ripening on the cacti around our house.  He knew to gather them with tongs to avoid touching those irritating glochids.   Still, how could we remove them from the surfaces of the fruits?  During drought years, ranchers in south Texas burn off the spines and glochids of prickly pear so that cattle can eat the pads, getting both food and water from the plant.  Could we not roast the glochids off the fruits?

Using a barbeque fork, my husband speared each tuna and held it over a stovetop burner.  The spines and glochids blazed up and disappeared.  Then I rinsed each fruit to be sure no glochids remained.

We cut the ends off each fruit and then quartered it.  When the pot was three-quarters full of cut-up tunas, we added a little water to the fruits.  After simmering this mixture for 45 minutes, we strained the juice through eight layers of cheesecloth.  The resulting four cups of juice was a vibrant pinkish purple.

We made jelly from this first batch using about five cups of sugar, a pack and a half of pectin, and a half a cup of lemon juice.  The lemon juice adds a bit of a tang the prickly pear fruits lack.  Following standard canning procedures, we made eight small jars of the beautifully colored jelly.  Our prickly pear jelly was not only lovely, but very tasty too.  Together, we ate half a jar that first evening!

Now for the syrup:  I found a recipe for prickly pear syrup on the Internet. It said to use equal amounts of sugar and juice and to boil it for half an hour.  Then, add lemon juice to taste.  I did this and the result was very much like the Grand Canyon’s prickly pear syrup.  I canned the syrup as I had the jelly.  We now had seven jars of jelly and three jars of syrup:  Enough to share! (Maybe.)

Don’t count on me to provide you with prickly pear jelly and syrup.  Get out there and gather a few tunas and make your own!  Just remember to leave a few fruits for the wild creatures to enjoy, too.