A Prickly Sweet Treat

So, this may not happen to you. But, it happens to me every year about this time. I drive by a prickly pear cactus, laden with the beautiful red pears, and my mouth waters. Yum - Prickly Pear Jelly!

Prickly Pears grow in my part of the world, and in many parts of the West. I live in Arizona, but not in the desert. I live in the mountains. We have snow in the winter. But this cactus, and several others, do fine here. The fruit of the prickly pear shows up this time of year. I call them pears, but they have other names: tuna, cactus fruit, nopales. The pads can also be referred to as paddles, and these, too, are edible.

So, the photo above is a plant that is about two doors down from me. I pass it every day when I come and go from my house. Every day. And I look at it and I wonder if anyone will be harvesting those fruit. So, one day I walked up to the house, and met the nicest lady, Barbara, who lives there. She told me I could have the fruit from her prickly pear.

So, armed with leather gloves, a pair of tongs and a tub, I went up and picked the pears. When they are nice and ripe, they come right off.

I carried the fruit back to the house in a big plastic tub.

Now, to make the jelly. A friend who is native to Arizona gave me her recipe a long time ago.

I have made it several times, but this year I wanted to try something different. I found other recipes on line, and one in a book I have called Arizona Highways Heritage Cookbook.

They all have subtle differences, so I kind of mixed a few together to come up with this process.

In the past, I cooked the fruit and then mashed it up. This year I roasted the fruit first to get the spines off, and soften it a bit.

This time, after I burned the spines off, I rinsed the pears in cold water, and pressed them through a screen to make juice. Hopefully, most of the pulp remained in the screen.

I transferred three quarts of juice, created with about 50 pears, into a kettle, and added 12 cups of sugar and the juice of eight lemons. I also added six envelopes of pectin powder.

Bring all of this to a boil for about 45 minutes, skimming foam.

After cleaning and sterilizing jars, can the jelly for 15 minutes in a hot water bath.

The 50 pears gave me 17 half pint jars of jelly. I love the color - so pretty!