Let the prickly pear cactus establish itself for several months before harvesting pads or fruit. Wait for the plant to grow a second or third pad before harvesting pads and wait until there are at least eight blooms on a pad before harvesting the fruit it produces.
Regarding the prickly pear fruit, the pears with the reddish-orange or purple skin and deep purple interiors are considered to be the sweetest, but the white-skinned varieties are more popular in Mexico. If you’re foraging for prickly pears, remember that while all pears are edible, only a few will actually be ripe and taste good. Get them when they are bright purple and look like rat food, just before starting to wrinkle.
Cut pads with a sharp knife in the late morning or early afternoon. This is when the acid content is lowest. Remove the pads just above the joint. Harvest fruit by twisting the fruit and gently pulling it away from the pad. You know the fruit is ripe when the glochids, or thorns, fall off the light or dark colored bumps on the fruit. Find pads that are bright green and firm. Small, young pads harvested in early spring are thought to be the most succulent, delicate in flavor, and have the fewest spines. The thicker a pad, the older it is. Older pads tend to be stringy and their sap will be thicker, which some people find unpleasant. Leave those for other species who use them as survival food during lean foraging seasons.
The tender pads are sometimes sold as “baby nopales”. If you’re harvesting them yourself, wear extremely heavy gloves or use tongs. Snap the pads off the plant or cut at the stem. Cutting at the stem reduces stress on the pad, and allows the cactus to recover more quickly than snapping or tearing the pad away. This helps keep your cactus plant healthy for future harvests.
The prickly pear plant has three different edible sections: the pad of the cactus (nopal), which can be treated like a vegetable, the petals of the flowers, which can be added to salads, and the pear (tuna), which can be treated like a fruit.
Remove the spines from the pad by using a vegetable peeler or a paring knife. Don’t take off the gloves until the pads are completely rinsed and the peeled remnants are cleared. The pads not only have large spines, but there are also tiny, invisible and far more irritating spines called glochids that are extremely difficult to remove from the skin. The spines and glochids can also be removed from the prickly pear pads by burning them off with a small torch or by placing the pad on a gas burner and turning it with tongs. Run the pad under cool water. Peel or cut off any discolorations or bruises. Slice or cut the pads (wipe the knife blade after each slice, as there can be small spines sticking to it), or leave them whole, depending on what you will be using the nopales for. To store nopales in the refrigerator, make sure they are fresh and unwrinkled. Wrap them tightly in plastic wrap. Nopales can be stored for up to 2weeks.
To cook nopales, they can be either boiled or grilled, as well as mixed with other ingredients. If you boil the nopales, you may sometimes have to drain and re-boil them once or twice, depending on how thick the sap is. The thicker the pad, the thicker the sap. Boiling them with a copper coin (an old Mexican “veinte”) is a common remedy to thin the sap and make it more palatable to unaccustomed diners. The boiled nopales are then drained, washed off with cold water and served as a salad with finely diced tomatoes, onion, cilantro and jalapeños and seasoned with vinegar, salt and lime juice.
If you grill the nopales, you might want to coat generously with pepper, salt, and other spices. They’re ready when they’re tender and slightly browned. Grilled nopalitos strips can be seasoned with fresh lime juice and a little olive oil. You can also add grilled portobello mushrooms to the mix.
Try stirring the cooked nopales into soup, mixing them into a salad or omelet, pickling them, or eating them alone.
For the pear fruit, remove the spines and place the pears in a plastic colander 5 or 6 at a time under cold water. Swirl the pears around for about 3 or 4 minutes not bruising them. Doing this washes all the fine blond hairs away, now you can handle them prickly free. Skin the pears. All the hairs gone slice off the thicker skin at both ends of the prickly pear (the bottom and the top). It takes a little practice to know how much to slice off.
Generally, you want to take off the skin without getting at the seed-filled center. Cut lengthwise along the pear’s top-bottom center line just through the skin. Using that slit, use the knife to lever the skin and peel it off of the rest of the pear. Cut the pear into slices, or stick onto a fork or skewer and serve. The flesh of the prickly pear can be used to make jam, jelly, sorbet, and cactus candy.
The seeds can be consumed with the fruit (but be careful not to bite into them, as they’re quite hard) or spit out. Some people eat the seeds in soup or dry them to be ground into flour.
To obtain the seeds, gather the Prickly pear fruit that grows off the top of the prickly pear plant (red egg shaped fruit): Put on gloves to protect your hands from the thorns. Slice the ends off the fruit. Stand the fruit up on one end. Make a thin, vertical slice down one side of the skin, and carefully stick a finger underneath. Peel away the skin by unwrapping the fruit like an orange. Use your fingers to break apart the flesh to find the seeds, which are studded throughout the fruit.
