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Made a trip out to Kimble county with the family for a little hunting, fishing and R&R. My daughter picked quite a few prickly pear tunas.

I made a prickly pear syrup today. Delicious, strawberry and bubblegum flavors big time. Recipe in following post.

BTW, the sand is to remove the glochids. Works infinitely faster and better than the fire method.

https://honest-food.net/how-to-make-prickly-pear-syrup/

Recipe has ideas on what to do with this syrup.

As student attending the university in Mexico City...,long ago...,we often went to the market to get prickly pear syrup for our breakfast toast. A candy made from the 'pears' was an additional treat.

When my dad was a kid, around WWI, his family (5 or 6) lived in a covered wagon, and they traveled from Fort Worth to New Mexico. They picked the prickly pear fruits and my grandma made jelly with them. I have never had any, but I'll bet it's good. I've looked at the process online, and thick, leather gloves are a must! Enjoy. TexasJim

TexasJim wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 11:50 am When my dad was a kid, around WWI, his family (5 or 6) lived in a covered wagon, and they traveled from Fort Worth to New Mexico. They picked the prickly pear fruits and my grandma made jelly with them. I have never had any, but I'll bet it's good. I've looked at the process online, and thick, leather gloves are a must! Enjoy. TexasJim

My daughter picked something like 25 pounds of these tunas. She used tongs to pick them. I have used about 4 pounds so far. She took 12 pounds with her. I have the remaining amount in the drink fridge hydrator drawer.

Rolling the ripe fruit around in medium sand for 30 seconds or so removed 99.9% of the glochids. I can handle the fruit without gloves once they get the sand treatment.

I plan on use the syrup for lots of things, Christmas gifts, margaritas, as a drizzle for fried chicken, as a part of a vinaigrette, as a marinade, for sorbet, I might even make a mead with some.

These prickly pears average about 2 ounces each or 8 to a pound. 3 pounds of fruit makes at least 800 milliliters of syrup, more if I’m careful not to spill any.

Raw, washed, peeled, and deseeded, the taste is oddly as if they have been slightly salted, there’s a beetroot type of flavor, a hint of bubblegum, something vegetal, and maybe faintly melon like and the suggestion of a strawberry.

With the syrup the strawberry flavor comes to the foreground. Bubblegum would be a strong second fiddle and melon stays about where it had been. The slight vegetal aroma is there and beetroot mostly disappears.

I’ll make at least one more batch of syrup and hopefully correct some of the minor mistakes I made the first time around.

My son wanted to make jelly out of them this year, so we picked and processed a few batches. It takes a double dose of pectin to get the liquid to gel correctly, but it sure is tasty stuff!

When they are available at HEB, I'll make a small batch of simple syrup for margaritas. Tasty stuff, thanks for sharing.

I used a little of the prickly pear syrup in a lemon vinaigrette to dress some garden fresh arugula. Recipe had honey or maple syrup as options and with that type a range I thought why not substitute prickly pear syrup? It was delicious. The Redfish caught Saturday baked Sunday with sides garden filet beans and arugula. Arugula is insanely easy to grow when it isn’t a million degrees outside, although I had a volunteer patch of bolted and bolting arugula all summer, and arugula is not inexpensive at the store. A typical packet of arugula seed will last for most of a year if one is careful about seeding. I saved seed from the summer bolted bunch of runway arugula and this is the offspring on the plate. Filet bush beans aren’t hard to grow, but they mostly like shoulder weather. 65-88°days and 45-69° nights, Getting a little cool now.

https://www.loveandlemons.com/lemon-vinaigrette/

Prickly pear syrup makes for pretty and tasty margaritas.

2 ounces tequila blanco
1 ounce prickly pear syrup
¾ ounces fresh squeezed lime juice
½ ounces Cointreau
ice

I enjoyed a glass of Prickly Pear fruit juice last night at dinner. It's surprisingly smooth and tasty with a little sugar, and I can see a bunch of "tuna" collecting trips ahead this year.

Last year I used the juice to make a syrup, basically just combined it with an equal amount of sugar like Morgenthaler's grenadine recipe, and I used it in place of grenadine in a Mexican Firing Squad. It was pretty good. My syrup went moldy before I came up with anything else, though.

Problem I've always had with prickly pear fruit is how slimy (snot-like) the juice is. Maybe I can't get the right level of ripeness, not sure. It seems to be common issue though.

I've tried freezing and re-freezing method a couple times, to break down the cell walls.

Tried to make some mead with them also, leaves a slippery feel on your pallet.

I have not tried boiling though, as most of my attempts were for mead making. Boiling removes so much of the fine flavors that by the time you boil, then ferment, most of the flavor is gone.

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