One of our favorite things to do when traveling is trying different kinds of fruits. This is how we first learned about our love of mangosteen in Southeast Asia. Sometimes when we get home, it’s possible to find a few of these fruits at the market and we can enjoy them all over again.
We recently picked up a some Prickly Pears and tried them for the first time. We went into it blindly thinking, “How hard can it be to eat a piece of fruit?”
When I sliced open this thorny fruit, the bright red juices oozed all over the plate. It looked delicious and it was clear that it had the potential to stain anything in its path. I took a spoonful right out of the center and it was nothing like what I had expected.
The flavor was delicious, sweet with a slight bite to it, but it was filled with tons of hard seeds. I couldn’t chew the seeds and it appeared there wasn’t much to the fruit otherwise.
YouTube to the rescue. It appears that I was trying to eat the wrong part of the fruit. I found this video and now I know how to eat a prickly pear!
This fruit grows on a cactus, so it’s important to clean off the outside before handling the fruit or cutting it open. You can do this a few different ways, but the video suggests using a knife, sliding it across the outside of the fruit and rinsing it under running water.
If you want to eat the seeds, you can just swallow them, but I prefer to take them out and eat the area in between the seeds and the skin.
Enjoy!
Have you ever tried a Prickly Pear?
