Prickly Pear

Out of plain curiosity I bought a couple of prickly pears at the market - completely without knowing that they are in fact the fruit of the very same cactus I've been cooking with in the past (see e.g. here). When I took the picture on the left of the tree with fruits and all I had no idea it was something I had already tasted. As you'll notice the fruits on the tree are orange while those I bought are paler, more greenish yellow. I've read that they also come in a red variety, which is suppossedly sweeter. Well, these were sweet enough for me at any rate.

The trick to eating them is to get into it without getting the so-called glochids on you - the skin of the fruit is covered with tiny hairlike little hooks that can just perfectly get attached to your skin where they're somewhat annoying (and all the more so because they're also difficult to remove because they are so fine). I used a paper towel to hold it and that worked fine. The skin is some 3-4 mm (1/8 - 1/6 of an inch) thick - first cut off both ends, then make a cut along the axis and peel of a strip of the skin - continue like this till you can remove all the skin (try to avoid touching the outside of the skin).

The fruit has lot of seeds in it, and they are hard too - so hard I couldn't crunch them, so chewing the fruit was a little bit of a careful staccato like procedure. I don't even know how to describe the taste - it wasn't really too much like anything I had encountered before. I'd say it's a bit of an aquired taste: I enjoyed the second one I ate a lot more than the first one.