Barrel Cactus Fruit

During a recent trip to Tucson I was looking for new and different foods to try - my favorite that I found was Barrel Cactus fruit. It grows at the top of the cactus in the early spring, and doesn't usually drop off, but most are eaten by wildlife within a few months.



They don't have any spines to remove, and are fairly easy to pick off the cactus but you need to be careful of the spines on the cactus itself. They're filled with seeds that need to be cleaned out before cooking. The seeds can apparently be mashed into a paste, but I haven't tried that yet. To clean them I just sliced them in half and scraped out the seeds.



They have a very sour taste, almost like a lemon rind. They are also tough and bitter in the center, almost like the pith of a lemon. The suggested prep that I found was to roast them with a little oil and salt until they softened. You can also eat them raw. I roasted a few them, let them cool, and then grated them into a simple salsa of burnt tomatoes, shallots, roasted corn, and cilantro. It added a really nice tangy sour flavor to the salsa. I'm going to try to cure some using the same method I use to make Lemon Confit and see how that turns out. I could see them working really well to make a variation on Lemoncello.

Going back to my youth (waay too many years ago) a classmate brought back candied barrel cactus fruit.
The fact that I remember this years later means that I must have really enjoyed it.

I could definitely see that working well!