How to eat cactus without impaling yourself

This is food that might be kind of hard to believe if like me , you don't come from a culture where people eat cactus .

But nearly every part of this plant is edible and potentially quite tasty .

There are obviously hazards , hazards , both glaring and insidious .

I'm gonna tell you everything I learned , trying to prepare this very angry plant for human consumption .

Parts of me still hurt .

Lots of cacti have edible parts .

But this is a classic a prickly pear known to science as the Opuntia genus .

It's named after the city of Opus in Ancient Greece , which was reputed to have an edible plant that could be grown by simply jamming its leaves into the ground .

The leaves would send out roots and indeed , you can grow prickly pear that way .

Just take basically any chunk of the plant , stick it in the ground and it can send out roots .

However , this almost certainly was not the plant in ancient opus that theoretic wrote about why ?

Because like most cactuses is native to the Americas and that genus includes hundreds of distinct species abundant across the warmer parts of the western hemisphere .

Very big .

And Latin American cuisine .

I have no idea which particular species of prickly pear .

This is because it's just a random plant hanging out in my neighborhood in Macon , Georgia in front of this vacant lot .

The house here burned down a few years ago , whomever lived here many decades ago , planted this cactus right on the border with their neighbor , which tells you a lot about what their relationship must have been .

Like , I've walked by that plant thousands of times and like half of the year .

It has these big purple fruits on it and they are true fruits , berries .

They have soft , sweet and sour flesh containing a pulpy core of little seeds .

In Spanish , they call the fruit tuna .

No etymological relation to tuna fish .

As far as I can tell , applied to cactus fruit tuna is a word of indigenous American origin .

The tuna grow up from the outer leaves called paddles or pads or in Spanish .

No , both the tuna and the nopales are edible but are best at different times of the year .

The tuna generally ripen in the fall .

It's actually winter here right now .

It's New Year's Day as I record this and there's still a ton of fruit ripening on that plant .

Most people seem to agree .

The best paddles or no are the new growth paddles that sprout up in the spring time ?

Those are lighter green and more tender than the mature paddles that we see on here right now .

You can tell the tuna are ripe when they are , of course , no longer green like that one .

And when they twist almost effortlessly off the plant , yeah .

Twisting I found is the motion you want to use , not pulling .

And yes , for God's sake .

Use tongs .

The first time I tried to harvest fruit from that thing , I thought , oh , this is gonna be easy .

I can see the spines really , really clearly .

All I have to do is just kind of grab between the spines .

Bad idea because lurking around all those big conspicuous thorns are many more , nearly microscopic ones called Glow kids or gloyd .

And these are hairy little demons straight from the fires of hades .

They are the worst .

Some varieties of prickly pear have more glow kids than others .

And it may depend on the season .

But basically any time I've gotten near that thing , I have noticed some weird telltale pains later .

If you look with a much more powerful microscope , you can see the glow kids are barbed .

All you have to do is brush past them and they'll hook into your skin and release from the plant .

You might not even notice them going in and even if you do .

Yeah , you can pull out the parts that's above the skin but not the barbed tips .

They just break off and stay inside you .

And what does that feel like ?

Well , I've got one in the tip of this finger right now .

And I don't feel it at all unless pressure is applied , then I feel this minor but sharp pain that made typing this script this morning a lot of fun .

I also always noticed this generalized , dull aching in my skin like a hand ache and it takes a few days to go away .

This may be due to a general inflammation or dermatitis caused by Glow kids .

Some people seem to have a particularly strong reaction to them .

And if you just carelessly brush past one of these plants when you're out hiking or something , you could just instantaneously be covered in millions of these Little Glow kids .

It's gonna be a problem in the 19 eighties .

Some researchers at the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy found that you can almost entirely prevent the inflammation by immediately removing exposed part of the Glow Kids with tweezers and then applying a household glue , letting it dry and then ripping it off .

You basically give your Glow Kid tips .

A bikini wax just use tongs , tongs are good .

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Now as bad as Glow kids feel on your skin .

Imagine how they feel on your tongue or in your throat .

Let's talk about how you actually eat these .

A popular method among hikers is to eat them right off the plant .

You grab a stick and just poke the blossom end of the fruit with it just to hold it steady .

There's a little belly button there that you can poke .

Then you just filet off the sides of skin with your knife .

I have read in several botanical texts that ripe fruits will drop .

Their Glow kids , they'll drop when they're really ripe for what it's worth .

There's lots of clearly very ripe fruit out on that plant right now and they still have tons of Glow kids on them to the point where I needed to wipe the loose Glow kids off my knife before I proceeded with this step where you just filet the edible flesh right off the seed core in the middle .

The seeds aren't poisonous or anything but they are very hard .

You can't crunch through them like papaya seedss .

What does it taste like ?

Purple ?

I think it tastes purple .

It has a generic fruity taste but also a slight vegetable taste as well , which I actually quite like , oh lordy .

There's a thorn , a thorn .

No , no , I'm just kidding .

The less ripe ones are way more acidic .

But devotees will know that's just fine with me .

Very nice .

But truthfully there just really isn't that much fruity flesh on this thing .

So much of it is those pulpy seeds .

So something that people do a lot of the time is simply juice it because there's tons of good juice in that pulp problem is you can't just wash them and toss them in a blender .

The skin has all those Glow kids in it and they're small enough to pass through a strainer and into your juice .

Now , I've seen some people simply grab the fruit with top , put it under running water and just scrub away at it with a really stiff scrubby .

Then you just have to wash and rinse it several times to make sure you have washed away all the loose glow kids .

Maybe that works with the store bought variety , which I've noticed seem to have fewer Glow kids on them , but these are just covered in them .

So we have to do something else .

An ancient method among indigenous peoples is apparently to roll the fruits around in sand quite vigorously .

The abrasive sand theoretically just lodges all the prickles and then you can wash them off .

Theoretically , another traditional method is to kill them with fire .

Now , we're talking , if you look really close , you can actually see the glow kids igniting and shriveling up .

People who have gas stoves often do this over the flame from their burner .

That'd probably work a lot better than this little fire .

Stick my kitchen torches out of butane .

This is gonna take forever .

You know what we need .

Now , we're talking .

Yeah .

Die Glow kids die .

The campfire is apparently a traditional method as well .

Just don't keep them in the heat for too long or they will burst open , then you can bring them inside and wash them off and people say you can then just cut them in half and simply peel the skin off with your fingers that did not work too well for me , it would have helped if I trimmed off the blossom and stem ends first , the skin really sticks around there .

I found the easiest thing for me was to hold the fruit upright with a fork and filet off the skin .

I imagine peeling with your fingers .

Works better with the big or store bought fruit .

Then you can mash them up by hand or just drop them in a blender or a food processor .

People usually put in a little water just to help everything flow around the blades and whiz it smooth , strain out the seeds and pulp and there you have it .

People will boil that down and make candies with it or they'll just stir in some simple syrup , maybe some lime juice .

And there you have a lovely little soft drink , a fresca tuna .

I , I'm simply going to spike mine with a little tequila and call it a day .

Is it worth it ?

I'm not so sure .

Is it delicious ?

Absolutely .

Oh , the paddles , the fresh no poles I see for sale in Latin grocery stores seem to only have the big conspicuous thorns that you can easily shave off with a knife .

This one from the plant up of the street has got tons of Glow kids on it too .

So kill them with fire die , die .

Yeah , you could just shave them off with the skin .

But when they inevitably fall off in the process , they would get stuck in that very sticky flesh .

Nopales are filled with muil that gluey polysaccharide that makes okra slimy texture wise .

The slime does not bother me much at all when eating it raw .

And I do very much like it raw .

If the tuna or the fruit is sort of a vegetable tasting fruit .

The paddles , the no are to me , kind of sort of a fruity tasting vegetable .

It's like if green beans were a sour fruit though , apparently if you harvest the pads in the morning , their acid content will be lower .

The slime becomes much more unpleasant to me .

When you cook these in Mexican food , a lot of the times they will boil these and then strain and wash them to get a lot of that slime out well prepared .

They make a very tasty taco filling .

I have not well prepared them , but there you have it , be safe and go taste of the forbidden fruit .

If you dare .