Farm Stand Marfa

CACTUS LOVE

A few weeks ago I went searching for the pitaya, the strawberry cactus, in the Terlingua Ranch area, southeast of Marfa, with a band of modern age friends and the botanist, Patty Manning from nearby Alpine.  The pitaya produces truly the most delicious fruit you can imagine.  The apricot- sized fruit when ripe tastes like a combination of a strawberry and a kiwi.  The edible tiny black seeds even crunch like the seeds of a kiwi. The taste is out of this world.  It’s startling to discover this kind of exotic flavor sensation in a rough desert environment where the temperatures regularly surpass100 degrees.

Echinocereus enneacanthus, known as pitaya in the Chihuahuan Desert where it grows, takes its name, echinos, from a class of marine animals- the starfish, the sea urchin and the sea cucumber- whose spines, oddly enough, resemble those of a hedgehog.

We were rewarded right away in our search, finding clumps of the pitaya cacti growing here and there over a rugged landscape of rocks and desert shrubs.  Several hours spent clambering over an increasingly hostile environment produced about 8 fruits.

But since we would probably not taste another pitaya fruit until next July, the excitement was palpable. Then with our blood still rushing from the thrill of the hunt, we turned our sights to other, more prolific prey.

Large stands of prickly pear cacti dotted the hillsides. This native, flat-stemmed spiny cactus is capable of reaching as high as 5 feet and sprawling just as wide. Unlike the exclusive pitaya, the grand prickly pears, Opuntia Englemanniis, were covered with dozens of fat, 3- inch long fruits in various stages of ripeness. When ripe, they become a luscious deep purple-red. Technically the fruits are berries, but are commonly referred to as fruits. In Spanish the fruits are called tunas.  Here in Far West Texas, the word tuna is part of our daily language.

Patty sliced a ripe fruit open and gave us each a bite.  It wasn’t as sweet as the pitaya, and its seeds were inedible, but it was juicy and the fleshy inside was a seductive magenta.  Inspired, we imagined a menu of prickly pear and goat cheese salad, arugula and prickly pear and of course prickly pear margaritas. We began to fill our mostly empty buckets with the deep rose-purple colored fruits. Within an hour our buckets were full and we were ready to head home.

Patty who is used to working in the high heat could have spent the rest of the afternoon collecting seeds from native plants, but I was spent and looked forward to an iced drink and a nap. Still we managed to pocket some seeds of the wooly Indian paintbrush and the berries of the desert olive.  Patty would start these seeds in the greenhouses at Sul Ross University in Alpine where she works and teaches.

During the hours it took to drive back to civilization, I daydreamed about the accounts of prickly pear festivals I found in the journals of the 16th century explorer Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow shipmates.

Imagine being castaways off the coast of Galveston Island in 1528, traveling, naked and barefoot, across southern Texas and northern Mexico for seven years, and living with a network of hunters and gatherers, early agriculturalists, traders and warriors who spoke different languages and were fiercely territorial but who came together for intertribal gatherings and trade fairs.

This was the story of Cabeza de Vaca and three other sailors, Dorantes, Castillo and Esteban, an African slave with a facility for language. Returning to Spain in 1537, de Vaca set down from memory a magical realist odyssey in La Relacion, the first written account of the indigenous peoples of Texas. In his memoir, de Vaca described encounters with 23 different tribes and bands.  According to de Vaca, most times the sailors were “lionized, showered with gifts, and escorted by excited crowds of people from one community to the next.”

Mid summer brought tribes together to celebrate the ripening of the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, also the source of nopales, the edible cactus pads. But it is the prickly pear fruit that ranked in importance as a seasonal food for the native peoples along with the pecan groves on the Nueces River and the bison hunting grounds of the Edwards Plateau.

Every year, de Vaca reported, the tuna harvest was an ecstatic celebration of ritual and trading. “To them the happiest time of the year is the season eating the prickly pears.  They go in no want then and pass the whole time dancing and eating, day and night.”

The harvest gatherings lasted for days and became trade fairs as well. Bows and arrows, hides, beads and ochre, mica, turquoise and obsidian and, perhaps most important, information, were traded even with warring tribes like the Apache. The fruits were juiced, roasted, and dried.  Green tunas were baked overnight in earth ovens. Ripe fruits were consumed fresh or, after drying, stored for the winter when the hunter-gatherers would spend their days digging roots to eat.

PREPARING THE PRICKLY PEAR

Unlike other cacti, the prickly pear is easy to grow.  A segment, a pad, can be stuck in the ground and with little water, because it is a desert plant, will take root.  In the old days, ranchers created corrals and fences with the cacti.  Some neighbors in Marfa have cultivated fences too. More than likely, a drive around town will uncover a number of stately prickly pear specimens.  This time of summer they are covered in fruit, some almost ripe, many still green.  To harvest the fruits, I have to keep a sharp eye out to get them before the javelinas, which relish the fruits and raid the edges of town anywhere the cacti grow.

Harvest the prickly pear fruit with a sharp knife or a pair of hand pruners.  Hold a bucket or basket under the fruit that is ripe for picking and cut the fruit where it attaches to the cactus pad.  Some people use tongs to twist the fruit off. Wear thick leather gloves to prevent the glochids, tiny barbed bristles, from piercing your skin.

To peel the fruit, pierce it in the middle with a fork, so you can hold the fruit steady while you work. With a sharp paring knife, cut off both ends of the fruit. Make a slit down the length of the fruit and peel back the skin, working the skin off with the tip of the blade.

If I want to eat the flesh of the fruit, I remove the hard black seeds clustered down the center. If I want the juice of the fruit to drink fresh or to cook down to make a syrup for sweetening drinks, pies and sorbets, I leave the seeds, which will be strained out later in the preparation.

A blender or food processor can be used to blend the fruits with their seeds, but in the interest of human-powered tools, I prefer the stainless steel food mill.  The food mill comes with three blades.  For our purposes, the fine blade is the one to use to make a puree. (The large blade is for ricing potatoes, which makes a superior mashed potato, since the process does not turn the potato to glue.)

http://www.chefsresource.com/pasfoodmil.html

Once the juice has been extracted, add a sweetener to taste and fresh squeezes from a lemon or a lime.  Experiment with sugar, honey, agave syrup and stevia as sweeteners. I suggest adding a small amount of sweetener.  The tartness of the natural fruit is delightful.  Too much sweetener will overpower its unique flavor. You can always make it sweeter for a specific recipe. When you have the taste you like, pour the mixture into a glass container and refrigerate so that the ingredients can meld together to make an elixir.  Later, pour the mix through a sieve to remove the seeds.

The prickly pear mixture is ready to pour into a sorbet machine or to be cooked down to make a thick syrup or to be used to make cocktails.  For a non-alcoholic drink mix the prickly pear juice or syrup with cranberry juice, sparkling water and lots of mint, crushed in the bottom of a glass.  For cocktails, flavor with basil, lemon verbena or mint.

The prickly pear will make a delicious Italian granita, a lightly frozen juice mix that does not require an ice cream machine.  Pour the sweetened juice mixture into a glass baking dish and leave it in the freezer for about an hour or so.  Using a fork, scrape the chilled bits towards the center of the dish, smooth them out and return to the freezer.  Repeat this scraping every half hour until the granita resembles shaved ice. Serve with fresh basil.

My guess is you will use up your prickly pear juice in no time.  But if you run out of ideas you can read Carolyn Niethammer “The Prickly Pear Cookbook.”

Enjoy the fruits of the desert.

(The Farm Stand Marfa Newsletter is published by Sandra Harper.  If you’d like to receive the newsletter contact farmstandmarfa@gmail.com.)

(The recipe for extracting the juice is adapted from a great recipe site http://fxcuisine.com/default.asp?language=2&Display=15&resolution=high )