These fruits are known as "tunas" and they are excellent for making prickly pear cactus jelly recipe, prickly pear candy recipe, prickly pear syrup, and even prickly pear margaritas. The Natomas Farm planted a plot of these Opuntia Ficus-Indica about four years ago, and now it is time to experiment with the "fruits of our labor" (didn't that sound cheesy)?!
We will pick our fruit by grabbing on to one and then gently tugging and twisting the fruit......with tongs. If the fruit is bright or dark red, it falls off very easily. We’ve tried the green unripe fruit and it is hard to get off the pad and it doesn’t taste very good. By the way....we use tongs because the fruit itself has tiny thorns......which will be either toasted off over a hot flame, or rubbed off. I said earlier that it is time to experiment with this crop....I need to come up with a quick way to rid these thorns. Also.....I want to find out if the fruit can be frozen, then processed during the farm's slower months.
Prickly pear syrup is the first runner up in the kitchen. Then the jelly. After all this cooking.....I may just change my name to Betty Crocker
For you history buffs.....thorn-less prickly pear does appear in the wild. However, the plant that most of us grow is a hybrid developed by a California breeder named Luther Burbank. Mr. Burbank was busy developing plants around the turn of the century. His two biggest successes were the Russet potato and the thorn-less prickly pear.
