Prickly Pears: Adventures with Nopales

For my first culinary experience with nopales I wanted something simple, so I made salsa. My meal was not entirely faithful to Mexican tradition because I served it with salmon and opa, yet it was a perfect combination! Everyone really enjoyed it!


You can see the salsa on the left.

The ingredients are shown on the right. For this recipe you will need:


1 1/2 cup cooked nopales
6 tomatillos diced
1 cup cooked white corn kernels
2 reconstituted dried chipolte peppers slivered
4 teaspoons orange juice
3 teaspoons lime juice
2 teaspoons chopped cilantro
1 teaspoon chopped mint

• First I grilled the whole nopales paddles for a few minutes per side to make them tender.
• Then I used a vegetable peeler to "rub" over the surface and remove the eyes. The eyes were attachment spots for thorns. I did not really try to remove all of the skin.
• Then I diced the nopales.
• I mixed all of the ingredients in a non-reactive bowl, then placed the bowl in the refrigerator so the flavors could mingle for at least 30 minutes.

While the salsa was "mingling," I worked on the other parts of the meal.  I used a recipe from epicurious at http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Grilled-Salmon-with-Lime-Butter-Sauce-1222181 for the salmon. I kept the lime butter sauce separated from the salmon so that people could use the salsa or the sauce as they desired. The lime butter sauce was the perfect accompaniment to the salmon and the opa. 

I had the opa squash, shown on the left, that I needed to use, not thinking of the fact that it is also called Asian squash. I just associated squash with Mexico and Latin America and thought it would go with the salsa. Then I found out that it was mostly used in Asian cuisine. 

This made me think of the wonderful world we live in these days! We can readily find many ingredients and mix aspects of different cuisines from all parts of the globe. I found the opa at the farmer's market, but later also saw them in the grocery store. 

So in this meal I am mixing Salmon, which I associate with the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with a Mexican Nopales Salsa, with a squash that is commonly used in Asian cuisine! This probably could not have been done easily in North America one hundred years ago. I feel so lucky!!!  

The picture on the right shows the inside of the opa. I diced the opa and steamed it. We smothered it with the lime butter sauce, and it was delightful!

The picture to the left shows the opa as it was served in the bowl.

The picture on the right shows the tuna or fruit of the prickly pear. Since we had never eaten it before, I wanted to eat it plain, so I just peeled it and cut the pulp into pieces. You can see the skin below the plate of fruit. The fruit has a lovely mild "watermelon" taste. It also has many seeds woven into the fibrous pulp. We just had to eat the pulp and spit out the seeds.


Prickly pear tunas make great jams and juices, and the seeds can be strained away from the pulp. That might be a better way to eat them.

Nopales: Nourishment in the Arid Lands

At first glance, these prickly pears don't look useful as food. But people have been eating them for thousands of years. 


In fact, they are quite nutritious as you can find out at http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/3030/2. 


The nopales are the flattened paddle-like stems of the cacti. The leaves of these plants are actually modified into spines for protection. You can see the fruit or tunas on top of the nopales.


The nopales contain large amounts of fiber and vitamins and have a very low glycemic index. A food with a low glycemic index causes blood sugar to rise slowly and does not shock pancreas cells to produce insulin abruptly. The tunas have similar nutritional characteristics.

Gloves must be worn when harvesting both the nopales and tunas. The nopales are easy to snap off or cut off with a knife. The tricky part is removing both the large thorns and hairlike bristles. Special gadgets are made for this, but many people use knives or peelers to cut out the thorns.
Of course you can do as I do...buy them in the store with the thorns removed.

These pictures were taken behind my home where prickly pears are common in the brush land. One day I will be ambitious and harvest them, but for now I will buy them in the store without the thorns.


The tunas are full of seeds that are difficult to remove because the fruity flesh adheres to them. Maybe that is why jams and juices are often made from them. The tuna can be smashed and strained preserving much of the  "goodness."  

A friend of mine who grew up in West Texas remembers picking the tunas with his friends as a boy. The boys would peel them and eat the luscious fruit. They would then spit the seeds at each other, kind of like we used to do with watermelon seeds. It was quite a fun game evidently! 


The tunas taste a bit like a mild watermelon to me. They are quite pleasant, and for boys in a small town in West Texas, they must have been delightful!

Prickly pears are in the genus Opuntia, which is quite a diverse group. Some are about 2 inches tall, and others are tree like and can reach 100 feet in height. The ones in central Texas tend to be around 3 to 4 feet tall on average. 

I will describe my adventure in cooking nopales in my next post.