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 going to 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 theophrastus wrote about why because like most cactuses opuntia 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 nopales 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 nopales are the new growth paddles that sprout up in the springtime 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 going to 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 glowkids or glochidia 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 tell-tale 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 glo 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 going to be a problem in the 1980s some researchers at the st louis college of pharmacy found that you can almost entirely prevent the inflammation by immediately removing the 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 and right now i bet some of you are thinking i'd rather just buy some food at the grocery store you know food that isn't trying to kill me well i say go for it friend and just remember to scan your grocery receipt with the sponsor of this video fetch rewards whom i'll now thank fetch is just the easiest way to save money 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as glow kids feel on your skin imagine how they would 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 fillet off the sides of skin with your knife i've 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 fillet 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 seeds what does it taste like purple i think it tastes purple it has a generic fruity taste but also a slight vegetal taste as well which i actually quite like oh lordy there's a thorn there's a thorn ah nah 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 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 tongs 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 dislodges 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 torch is out of butane this is going to take forever you know 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 bigger 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 whizz 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 agua fresca de tuna i am 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 nopales 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 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 mucilage 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 vegetal tasting fruit the paddles the nopales 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

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,398,959

Rating: 4.934298 out of 5

Keywords: cactus, prickly pear, cactus fruit, glochids, glochidia, tuna, agua fresca de tuna, agua de tuna

Id: d84Kj6CJTKI

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/WaffleFoxes]

This one's a no from me dawg.

Fascinating. I loved it. But, no.

[u/2Liberal4You]

One of the better Monday videos. I wish he spent more time on the nopales though, because I don't actually know how to prepare them.

[u/sticky-bit]

Here's an Agua Fresca recipe/video from Junkyard Fox

Making Prickly Pear Cactus Fruit Juice -Refreshing Summer Drink! Agua Fresca

This is my absolute favorite way to consume prickly pear cactus fruit. This is a really refreshing summer drink.

[u/PersonalBarber]

You’d get chopped nopales in all kinds of grocery stores in San Diego and we used to just make Indian curries with them. Agree on the okra texture, but unlike okra boiling nopales was an easy out to get that goo away.

[u/xd877]

I loved the energy he had in this video, really informative too. I had no idea you could eat anything on a cactus.