How to Eat Prickly Pear Cactus

Reviewed by Chef Jeff Woodward

Last Updated: July 19, 2024 Fact Checked

Prickly pear cactus has been a staple of the Mexican and Central American diet for thousands of years. In parts of the U.S. it has been gaining popularity as an exotic, gourmet and healthy addition to one's diet. 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. They grow wild throughout the American southwest, down to South America and up to Canada. The ones you may find at a local store or farmers market will surely originate from a commercial nopal farm.

Ingredients

Nopales (prickly pear pads)
Prickly pear (the fruit of the cactus)
Pepper, salt, other spices

Method 1

Method 1 of 2:

Pads or Nopales

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1
Buy or forage some prickly pear pads. See Warnings. There's a reason it's called the prickly pear cactus.^{[1]
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- 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.
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. See Warnings.^{[2]
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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.
5
Cook the nopales. They can be either boiled or grilled, as well as mixed with other ingredients to make unique, satisfying and healthy dishes.^{[3]
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- 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.
- A popular and traditional Mexican dish is "nopalitos en salsa verde", where the nopales are cut in strips and boiled in water (see above), and then re-cooked in the traditional sauce made of tomatillos (which are sometimes mistaken for green tomatoes, but are actually a completely different fruit that grow in a papery husk), onion, garlic, cilantro and jalapeño chiles (puree the sauce ingredients in a blender and then bring to a boil and simmer). This is usually eaten in a soft tortilla as a taco or with chips.

Method 2

Method 2 of 2:

Prickly Pear

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1
Buy or harvest some prickly pears.^{[4]
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- 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.
- Store-bought prickly pears are usually spine-free and sometimes can be handled with your bare hands. Unprocessed pears still have glochids that will drive you crazy if you get some on your skin. Just to be sure, always use tongs or at least a plastic bag as a glove.
- 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.
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Remove the spines.^{[5]
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- Place the pears in a plastic colander five or six at a time under cold water. Swirl the pears around for about three or four minutes not bruising them. Doing this washes all the fine blond hairs away, now you can handle them prickly free.
3
Skin the pears.^{[6]
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- 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 centerline just through the skin. Using that slit, use the knife to lever the skin and peel it off of the rest of the pear.
4
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, wine, 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.

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Question

Are all prickly pear cactus edible?

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This answer was written by one of our trained team of researchers who validated it for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

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All prickly pears (cacti in the genus opuntia) are edible, though you may find that many varieties are not as tasty, have more spines or seeds than the prickly pears and cactus pads you can find in stores.

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What kind of cactus can you eat?

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All prickly pear varieties are edible, saguaro cactus fruit is edible (though not easy to come by), organ pipe cactus and barrel cactus fruit is edible, as is dragon fruit, which grows on a cactus. There are several other types of cactus which are eaten throughout the world, but these are some of the most common.

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Can you eat prickly pear cactus raw?

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Yes, both the pads and fruit can be eaten raw, just be sure to carefully remove the spines before eating if they haven't been removed.

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Tips

The flavor of prickly pears has been compared to kiwi, but not as acidic.

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If you get the fine spines stuck in your skin, don't bother with tweezers. Instead put a thin layer of Elmer's glue over the spines. Let the glue dry until there is a solid "skin" on your hand, then peel it off. The spines will peel off painlessly with the glue. The glochids actually are barbed and will work into your skin if you are not careful. If you don't have Elmer's glue handy, duct tape or strong tack masking tape can remove the glochids.

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The cooked pads have a flavor comparable to green beans. They also have a texture reminiscent of okra.

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Use a high pressure hose to spray the fruit. This helps to remove the glochids. Then boil the fruit in water, mash it, add sugar, and bring to a boil again. Leave it to cool to room temp then sprinkle them with yeast. Pour the mixture into a sealed jar, seal it and wait two weeks. Before you know it, you have a fine wine. Bottle it, leave it to age. The longer you wait, the better it gets.
Nopales have a similar taste to okra in that they can be slimy. You can reduce that taste by soaking the diced nopales a few times in water until your desired preference.
You can also take out the spines by covering them with duct tape, the ripping the duct tape off.

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Warnings

Some species of prickly pear cactus don't have spines, but all have glochids.

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Be very careful when removing the spines from the plant, or buy pads or pears that are already de-spined.

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Unless you wear extremely heavy gloves, it's best to handle the pads with tongs or some other "remote" device.

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Beware pear cactus can poke thorns through you and hurt really bad.

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If harvesting your own plants, always wear hand protection.

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