You’ve heard of ramps and paw paws, but have you ever tasted Virginia’s own prickly pear cactus fruit? The fuchsia colored “tunas,” as they’re called by amateur foragers, are hitting their peak ripeness as we speak.
The Eastern Prickly Pear cacti, known by the species name Opuntia humifusa, grows north to New York, west to Iowa and south to Florida. But I only had to go as far as Richmond’s Manchester neighborhood to pick mine.
They look like a cactus, with vibrant green pads covered in nasty visible and nearly invisible spines. Picking them can be hard, but Jayton Howard, a horticulturist at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, has a suggestion: “Tongs go a long way.”
But before I got a few hundred spines in my hands, before Howard told me that trick, and likely long before any of us were alive, the prickly pear was working its way east toward the Commonwealth
“A bear or something was in there and decided to eat a prickly pear and it decided to extend its area where it roamed and the fruit was able to drop and adopt and take hold,” Howard says.
Despite what you might assume about desert-loving cacti, Howard said the prickly pear we know likely adapted as it moved, learning to live in wetter areas. Among adaptations, the development of more spines toward the top of the pad, and fewer at the bottom.
“That allows those ground dwelling creatures to come along, brush up against those flowers, pollinate those plants, get a little bit of a snack but then leave the rest of the tissue alone so that way the plant isn’t overly harmed and is able to continue growing,” Howard says.
Now that I’ve harvested my fruit, it’s time to process it.
That’s where Paul Kirk, bar manager at the aptly named Fuzzy Cactus in Richmond’s Northside, comes in. He’s cutting off the skin as he lays out his plan:
“I’m gonna blend these up... Then I’m gonna add the simple syrup to that, blend it all up to strain out," Kirk says. "Use a fine mesh strainer, cheese cloth would probably be the best.”
Kirk says they used to make this syrup themselves, getting the cactus fruit delivered and processing it in batches, but it took too much work. He uses a pulp now.
We head back to the kitchen with our freshly chopped fruit, and he drops it in the blender, adds in equal parts sugar - and hits the blend button.
After about 30 seconds of that we come back to the bar where he begins to prep the drink.
First, he salts the rim and puts some ice in to chill the glass. In a cocktail shaker he combines 1 oz Reposado tequila: “that’s gonna add that earthiness, a pepper back flavor to it,” Kirk says.
Then one 1 oz of mescal, “Very fall, that smokiness.”
An oz of lime juice, a quarter oz of triple sec and finally, an oz of our freshly made prickly pear juice.
He gives it a 15 second shake…. And we pour and taste: "That’s super good... Yeah, that’s delicious."
"Nothing’s better than a margarita at 1 o'clock in the afternoon on a Thursday,” I joke.
For those who don’t imbibe, a N/A version could be made. Back at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Jayton Howard said there are plenty of ways to cook prickly pear, including the pads themselves, known as nopales.
“Grilled, fried, put in soups, salads, used as a screwed fried fruit or vegetable or fruit thing," Howard says.
Among curious taste testers is Nathanael Vitkus. He moved to Richmond from New Hampshire a few months back and he’s been on the hunt for foraged foods ever since.
“There’s just a part of me that loves the outdoors," Vitkus tells me in a phone call. "I made it all the way to eagle scout and there was a merit badge called ‘wilderness survival’ so definitely close what to what it means, its survival in the wilderness.”
As for the prickly pear, or tunas as he called them in a Reddit post looking for foraging locations, he made a sweet syrup like the one at Fuzzy Cactus, but he plans to turn that into preservers.
“It was like a warm citrusy flavor, it’s not something that is commonplace," he said. "But this is a fruit full of sugar naturally so it's coming forth with the added sugar to the mix.”
The prickly pear cactus hits peak ripeness as summer turns to fall - head on out and start looking for yourself, just make sure you bring some tongs.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
