Picking and Processing Prickly Pears

(Click on photos to enlarge for better view.)

On Tuesday, August 5, my friends Sherri, Liz, and Liz's granddaughter, Sarava, went prickly pear picking. We learned from last year that the weapon of choice for picking the fruit is a pair of tongs. These long-handle barbecue tongs work especially well. Just grab and twist.

Sherri smiles as she picks her first fruit. A hat is always wise to wear in the desert.

Liz joins the picking. Notice her gloves and dark sunglasses.

Some cactus bushes are quite large.

Sarava lends a hand with picking.

We filled 2 buckets and 2 plastic grocery bags with fruit. Here we are setting up to process. The large blue pot will be used to collect juice as it cools.

Tools needed: 3 large pots for boiling the fruit. One of ours was a spaghetti pot with a built in strainer. If you don't have one of these you will need a strainer instead.

One small sieve

1- 2 quart pitcher

1 package of cheese cloth

1 potato masher

We are doing this in a two step process, so today we just processed the juice. We will make the jelly next week. If you plan to do the same,you will need gallon jugs to store the juice in your refrigerator or freezer. The juice can be frozen and made into jelly at a much later date.

Bucket of pears. The blue bucket was also full.

Wash pears in water and place in pot. It is not necessary to try to remove the spines as they will be strained out later. Fill with enough water to come up to edges of top fruit. Do not leave extra fruit sitting in wash water as the juice will start to leach out.

Place on stove and boil for 30 minutes.

Halfway through boiling time mash with masher.

Strain pulp and juice through strainer. Let extra juice drip from pulp. It is okay to mash the fruit once again while it is dripping.

Filter juice minus pulp through cheesecloth covered sieve. This removes the spines that were present on the pears along with any remaining seeds. DO NOT squeeze the cheese cloth as this may force spines through into juice. We used the cheese cloth in 3 layers and cut off a section large enough to fit our sieve as it came out of the package.

Pulp after straining.

Steaming juice.

Here you can see the spines and seeds strained out by the cheese cloth. The strained juice is in the pitcher, the unstrained juice is still in the pot.

We would have 2 pots boiling at once and set the timer for 30 minutes once the water started to boil.

I poured hot juice over ice and mixed it with ginger ale, a refreshing treat! Look at this lovely color!

Three and a half gallons of juice ready to be made into Prickly Pear Jelly next week. We started picking prickly pears at 9:45 a.m. We were done picking by 10:30. We were done processing juice and we had the kitchen cleaned up by 2:30. For each batch of jelly we will need 2 1/2 cups of juice which will yield about 5-8ounce jars. You do the math. We could be at this for a long time!

One word of caution: If you use plastic bags to put your prickly pears in while picking,throw them out immediately when you get home. We did not get any spines in our hands while picking or even washing the fruit, but we did get spines in our hands from touching the plastic bags that some of the pears were in. We kept a pair of tweezers nearby as these tiny spines are very painful! Remove and wash all your clothing afterwards as they may have spines in them also.

Note: All of today's photography is by Kathie with the Nikon D80 using the 18-70mm lens and the 70 to 300mm lens.