An article with a Cactus recipe was brought to our attention….
It sounds delicious, and is written by one of Australia’s most well-known and respected chefs, Steven Manfredi.
I wrote him and asked if I may include it on our blog, he graciously permitted us to reprint it…
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Prickly Pear Souffles by Steve Manfredi
It may be difficult for some to think of Captain Arthur Phillip as Australia’s first ecological vandal but he brought in one of the most invasive plants ever to come into this country. He collected some cochineal-infested prickly pear in Brazil and sailed the cacti to these shores with the First Fleet.
The cochineal insects feed on prickly pear and, when processed, these insects produce the crimson-coloured dye carmine. Amongst other things, this colour was used for the red coats of British soldiers at the time.
In 1886 the first (Commonwealth) Prickly-pear Destruction Act was passed though the cactus was already a problem 20 years earlier. It wasn’t until 1996 that the (NSW) Prickly Pear Act 1987 was repealed and management for the “noxious weed” transferred to local governments.
While it’s still a problem in certain areas of Australia, people from parts of the Mediterranean and the Americas adore its fruit. It looks like a small barrel about 6-8 centimetres long but care should be taken in handling the fruit because the fine hairs will lodge in the skin.
Peeling is easy. Handle the fruit with a gloved hand. Cut off each of the ends using a sharp knife. Make a slit skin-deep down the length of the fruit and peel the skin away from the pulp. Prickly pear fruit can range from red to deep yellow and is sweet and juicy.
Make the sugar syrup first by boiling 100ml water with 100g caster sugar. Once it boils, cool. Whatever is left can be refrigerated indefinitely. Place 8 prickly pears in a food processor and puree. Place in a sieve, over a bowl and separate juice from seeds, discarding the latter. Place yolks in a bowl with 2 tablespoons of sugar. Whisk continuously over a simmering pot of water for about 5 minutes until fluffy and thick like zabaglione or custard. Put aside to cool. Beat egg whites to soft peaks. Add remaining tablespoon of sugar and keep whisking until stiff peaks form. Gently fold half the prickly pear juice with the whisked egg whites, whipped cream and cooled yolk/sugar mixture until evenly incorporated. Ladle into 6 moulds and place in the freezer for at least 4 hours. Mix the sugar syrup with the remaining prickly pear juice. To serve, unmould the soufflés by dipping the bases quickly in hot water. Spoon a little sauce on and serve with wedges of the remaining prickly pear. Serves 6.
PRICKLY PEAR WITH MASCARPONE CREAM AND ROAST PISTACHIO
Puree the peeled prickly pears in a food processor. Sieve over a bowl and separate juice from seeds, discarding the latter. Place the puree in a saucepan with 50g of caster sugar and bring to the boil, stirring. Once boiling, turn down to a bubbling simmer until the liquid has reduced by half. Let it cool and refrigerate. Meanwhile beat the egg whites in a bowl, slowly adding the rest of the caster sugar until firm peaks form. To this add the mascarpone and fold in until the resulting mixture is light and fluffy. To serve, ladle some prickly pear puree into bowls, add a large dollop of mascarpone cream and scatter some chopped, roasted pistachios on top. Finish by dusting with ground cinnamon. Serves 8.
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I encountered two items I’ve not heard of before… one is the ‘Caster Sugar’ which is the same as what we call ‘Powdered Sugar’ in the US. The other item is ‘mascarpone’ which comes from his region of Italy (Lombardy) and is probably best known as the essential ingredient, along with coffee and savoiardi biscuits, in the popular dessert tiramisu. It should be fairly easy to buy from Italian providores or even supermarkets. See here:
We’re not in San Francisco, but these old lady cactus wear flowers in their hair.
I picked these little plants up at a plant sale in 1998.
In that twelve years they have gotten to nearly six feet tall. They have bits of the oak tree blossoms in their hair.
The story goes that a teacher decided it would make a great lesson in arts and biology to have the kids paint their own little ceramic clown…
Then they each added some purchased cactus potting mix, and planted one cactus seed that someone had donated from a little packet they had picked up in the southwest on vacation.
The little plants grew, and for the entire school year they cared for the young seedlings…
Until someone decided they weren’t growing the way they wanted them to….
So they were removed from the classroom. The administrators purchased little ivy sprigs to substitute for the cactus, and the kids got to take their project home with them at the end of the year.
We got down to thirty degrees F last night. This is the first freeze this year.
Most years we get a dozen or so nights below freezing. When the temps get below 30 it starts to injure cell tissue in our Nopalea grande plants. The other Opuntia are tolerant of lowers temperatures. 28 is when we can expect real damage on the Nopalea grande.
Last night with 30, we might have some twisting of the leaves…. any cells that froze and burst open will cause a deterioration in the leaves, which will be sealed off by the healthy tissue, but cause unsightly scarring, and as the leaf continues growth the scarred tissue will not expand, so a curving and twisting of the leaf might occur as the leaf continues growth. I don’t think we’ll have any real issues with the temps last night… but the next few days will reveal any damage that did occur.
icy times for the cactus
This is a photo of the ice that accumulated overnight on the cat’s water dish.
You can see a change in coloration near the tip of the cactus leaf….
this might be frost damage… however the plant might not be damaged…
we’ll know more in the next few days.
It’s a shame that just a dozen nights a year can have such a bad affect on the leaves.
It is for this reason that I check the temps on occasion on nights when frost threatens.
I spent a week clearing out our ‘Triangle Garden’
We don’t grow triangles there, it’s named that due to the shape of the space it takes in the arroyo
I planted all these plants some ten or twelve years ago
and haven’t done much at all with them
the area grew together,
so I had a few tons of material to pull out and toss into the compost pile
Opuntia ficus-indica, var. Lynnwood
Our 'Triangle Garden'
Like any garden you plant and leave alone for ten years or more,
you’ll get a lot of overgrown effect
We have poison oak growing in there too.
Engelmanii cross
This is one of the plants that has grown to incomprehensible sizes.
It is an Opuntia that is a cross of Engelmanii
It was given to me in ‘98 by the noted author and cactus researcher David Epelle of Arizona
he called it a ‘cactus on steroids’.
I’ve had enough of the ‘roid rage’ of this spiny plant that I am afraid to even sell.
And the three original cladodes I planted have grown into a
VERY spiny cactus patch some fifteen feet across
While tearing into it, I cme upon an old ‘Ginsu’ knife and a set of tongs
that I must have lost in this patch years ago when taking cuttings.
Believe me, although it is interesting,
I don’t think any family should have this plant on their property.
It’s just too spiny and so very dangerous.
The Law in its majestic equality,
forbids rich as well as poor to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets,
and to steal bread
~Anatole France~
Since 1993 we’ve been an organically certified small farm in California. I had a job with a contractor which paid our household expenses and kept us solvent even when the farm sales were less than our farm expenses. But two years ago when the factory in town closed down, and most of us were laid off, I decided to go into the cactus growing more full time. We grow a unique vegetable which we’ve shipped throughout the country. Initially we shipped the cactus leaves as nursery stock, then governmental regulations tightened and we became more aware of the laws and regulations of shipping nursery stock into other states. So we switched to shipping the younger leaves for people to eat themselves as produce. Our goal has been to ship to Health Food Stores, and restaurants as well as individuals who might be interested in the leaves we grow. Through the years our customer list grew slowly but steadily at a steady 30% rate. As the years progressed the governmental regulations seemed to grow more onerous… and the last year we’ve lost many of our older customers due to the recession. Other businesses have quit, some people seem to have stopped their regular orders. Yet, due to aggressive marketing, our sales this year are the highest we’ve ever had due to many new customers. Yet this was done at the expense of any profit we might have had. And again the government has come down on us harder. Now we have been notified that we must complete a fifteen hour ‘continuing education’ credits in water pollution and conservation. I’m all for education, but these government-mandated classes for all farms in the state are not provided for free… we must pay for them ourselves. The worse part is that they are given in the major population centers of Ventura or Monterrey to which we must take ourselves, and pay for our own lodging for the three days of the course.
It is this extra bit that has me stymied. We don’t really make any money doing this cactus business. All of our money goes to shipping, governmental fees of several thousand dollars yearly in order to maintain our licenses, permits, and associated fees and overhead expenses. Knowing that this trip will lead us into negative financial territory makes me reluctant to want to go. Knowing that due to these regulations, we must take a sample of our water and have it analyzed monthly at unknown costs…. I am seriously aggravated at the state of our laws and the level of compliance required even for tiny little micro-farms.
We have some months in which to take the classes, and maybe I’ll find some classes nearby, but this more personal posting than usual is to let the people know that governmental regulations are a double-edged sword. While they give the USA good traceability in produce, and what is perhaps the safest produce in the world, it also makes for stronger economy-of-scale issues that stymie the small grower… right at a time that we are needing MORE small farms, not less. If we were a huge corporate farm, with many employees, still we would need just one person to go to the classes, but when it’s a one-man operation, the standards are the same. The costs are the same, but they are a larger share of the profit in a small operation like ours.
My usual outlook is of hope and positive thoughts. Rarely am I dragged into this level of aggravation. I am sure I will sign up for the classes in Monterrey, they seem very informative and interesting. But people need to know that excessive governmental regulations strangle small business, they hamper the process of business formulation. We need to seriously look at what we want for this country, a place where people can transact business legally and efficiently with little governmental interference. If the government requires classes such as this, it should place them within the reach of the people, if it requires monthly water sampling, it should have a method to make such sampling efficient and inexpensive, (the paperwork mentions some samples might cost $8,000 yearly).
Excessive governmental regulations hamper small business more than the large. If due only to ‘economy of scale’.
When my dad grew up on an Ozark farm in the thirties and forties, they raised corn and wheat, raised hogs which they sold every fall and winter, and had a hundred or so chickens from which they sold eggs daily. They had five or six milk cows which they milked by hand, using the milk for food and their dogs, and one milk-can daily which they left on the roadside for the milk company to pick up. They also went to neighboring farms to supply skilled farm labor. Nowadays they would have to have many more permits, and each operation would require specialized equipment and permits and licensing. As all these regulations pile onto business, you must streamline your operations, drop aspects that have no profit and require permits, then you start to specialize. Yet a small family farm should not be a specialist farm, it should have a wide variety of foods and animals to create the ‘loop system’ for bio-diversity. Yet through the years we have had to drop livestock from our farm, first initially because we did not have proper butchering facilities, so we stopped the breeding of animals, until we had no more. We stopped using manures for fertilizer years ago because the government is worried about contamination of the soils with bacteria from manures. We stopped bringing in mulches for weed control and soil building because we could not vouch for the exact trees the wood chips came from. We are now a closed system with no outside inputs, and only material going out at a rate of a ton a month. Yet even this production is priced so low, and the shipping and governmental costs are so high, that we make no profit. One day, it might just get through my head that I’m better off just enjoying the property ourselves, and stop working so hard to make a business out of it. Yet, I know I can’t, we have such great customers….
While mulling these thoughts over in my head, I decided I needed to go for a walk. So with my camera in hand, I went down the road and took photos of the things I love about living here. And it is when in the wilderness, when I am furthest from people and the government, that I am closest to God and nature. These photos are my world, they are my daily activities and sights…. it is what is most in my heart.
The large oak once was a nut that stood its ground
Spanish Moss on Black Oak
Cutbank on the canyon road
Cutbank on the canyon road
The green lush creek bottom
The green lush creek bottom
Live Oak reaches over the creek
Live Oak reaches over the creek
Old cattle Loading Chute
Miocene Deposits, this was all once underwater
Oak Woodlands
Poison Oak vines wind up the Oak Trees
Spanish Moss on the Oak Tree
A tarantula, means rain is coming soon!
A tarantula, means rain is coming soon!
A tarantula, means rain is coming soon!
Right around the bend from home, my daily view
‘One Tin Soldier’
`Lambert-Potter’
Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
‘Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own.
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after….
One tin soldier rides away.
So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill,
Asking for the buried treasure,
Tons of gold for which they’d kill.
Came an answer from the kingdom,
“With our brothers we will share
All the secrets of our mountain,
All the riches buried there.”
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after….
One tin soldier rides away.
Now the valley cried with anger,
“Mount your horses! Draw your sword!”
And they killed the mountain-people,
So they won their just reward.
Now they stood beside the treasure,
On the mountain, dark and red.
Turned the stone and looked beneath it…
“Peace on Earth” was all it said.
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after….
One tin soldier rides away.
Our cactus plants have great fruit that ripens in late summer, and will continue to yield through January
Right now we have a special sending out approximately five pounds of fruit in little plastic ‘clamshell’ containers
We place those into the 15×15x5 inch boxes and fill in around them with Grade C cactus
Grade C is the best grade for home and restaurant and health food uses
Grade C is in general a thicker leaf, this will give you more food per leaf and less time involved in preparation
Here’s some photos of the leaves and the fruit.
In the lots of photos above we can see clamshell containers loaded with the cactus fruits.
These ones are mainly loaded with ‘robusta’ fruits.
We have five varieties that fruit, and the seasons overlap on these.
So the varieties will change as the months progress.
Most shipments will carry two colors/types of cactus fruit, so you get a little variety.
My favorite is NOT the robusta… but many people like it because it is so very deep red in color,
and they like the fact that it may carry more nutrients.
Right now we are shipping two of the representative fruits….
We are picking an Opuntia ficus-indica that we call Lynnwood
The purple one is the Opuntia robusta, deep red juice is in that fruit
We clean the fruits to a degree, but there may still be a stray glochid here and there,
we recommend you wear dishwashing gloves to handle them
These fruits are very spiny while on the plant.
We do a fair amount of wiping to clean them for you.
Two photos show the Lynnwood fruit opened up, and the rind pulled back.
This gives you a nice little ball of cactus fruit.
One photo shows the fruit sliced open… notice the little seeds,
don’t try to bite them, they are hard little things.
They are also too small and numerous to spit out…
so either juice the fruit (it is very sweet), or just swallow the little seeds.
Some folks have digestion issues with little hard seeds, so be aware if that fits you.
Observe how deep and dark red are the Opuntia robusta fruit
These are not a personal favorite of mine, but we know that many people like dark-colored juices.
Fruits and vegetables of deep red color are often said to have a very high nutritional content
I’m no nutritionist, and I don’t know. But they don’t taste as good to me as the other varieties we sell.
We’ve had people buy them for the deep red color to the juice,
it can be used to impart a pinkish hue to other foods… if you like that
The juice is almost blood-red, it’s kind of scary on the knife.
These robusta fruits have to be sliced in two, then the insides scooped out with a spoon.
They don’t separate from the rind easily the way the other fruits do.
Some of the photos show two clamshells loaded with fruit, and packed into the shipping box.
Then we pack around and over them with Grade C nopal cactus
We pack it up until we get to almost fifteen pounds.
We sell it as twelve pounds. You pay shipping on twelve pounds.
We’re selling these lots of fruit and leaves for just $40 plus the shipping costs.
We will be shipping these by UPS Ground.
I’m a fan of machines… I like engineering and enjoy seeing the ways people will take a problem, and design a machine to get things done. Yet at the same time I am conflicted by my own desire to do things as simply as possible. There’s no point to a machine to do something simple when you can do it without making a machine. I suppose it’s the old cost/benefit ratio you have to examine.
The machine below for example…. it’s cool to watch someone trim the leaf edges with a machine that reminds me of the glass-grinder I used to use to make stained-glass windows…. but then again, it doesn’t really save time, I think it would take about the same amount of time to trim the leaves by hand, and you’d not need the electricity, nor have the whine of a machine near your head. Being too close to a machine all the time tends to wear on the psyche… the body grows tired from trying to resist the intrusion of the noise… so then you have to wear hearing protectors (I’d use mine with the built in music speakers and my I-Pod, so I can cut the machine noise, and listen to Nina Hagen and QNTAL at the same time. But I’d probably wear myself out even more with too much Nina). I’d think eye protection would be good also… and no long sleeves or hair that could get caught in it.. so I’d have to wear a face mask to keep my mustache out.
Now, the video below shows a laser machine being used to remove the cactus spines. It’s pretty interesting, and again my fascination with machines and technology makes me perk up and watch it…. yet again I think that our cactus leaves are so easy to clean (just a scrub pad) that there is no need for the expense of a laser machine. Although I imagine for a while it’d be fun to watch the flashes of light. And it is interesting that this expensive machine is much slower than working the cactus by hand, so it is not even a time saver.
Naw, I guess for now I’ll just go on trimming by hand.
~Tao teh Ching~
‘Chapter 80′
I see a small country of small population.
A simple folk, who even if highly skilled work simply and easily.
Tools are seldom used. They do not bother to invent time-saving appliances.
They dearly love life, and take care to avoid death.
Since they love their homes and land, they do care to wander.
Even with their horses, boats and carts, they do not wish to travel about.
Though they may have armor and weapons, these are kept out of sight.
These people have returned to simple techniques for record keeping.
Their food is tasty but simple; their clothing is unpretentious.
They are content with their simple homes,
and the simple pleasures and customs of a simple people.
And even though there might be a neighboring land within sight,
so that the crowing of roosters and the barking of dogs can be heard from it;
these people will have lived their entire life without ever having gone to that country.
New products made from nopal cactus are starting to come out onto the market.
This one is made from wild-harvested cactus plants. I don’t really like the idea of folks wandering the desert and harvesting plants. The animals of the desert use this amazing plant for their life…. I’d be happier if this company advertised that the plants were grown on the terraced fields of Rivenrock…. but instead they take the food from the mouths of the wild critters in the Sonoran desert and call it ’sustainable wild-crafting techniques’.
The commercial is a bit overblown, almost sensationalistic…. but dang, I sure do love the photography and the scenery in this commercial. And I am sure that it is a very healthy drink.
The great Gobi desert of China is a paleontologists dream. Since I first read of the early 20th century dinosaur egg discoveries in it’s arid tracks, I’ve had an interest in the people and environment of the Gobi.
Now the spread of the desert is causing great problems to people not accustomed to the desert.. they live on the edges, in the grasslands and herd animals.
Perhaps a great planting campaign of cactus might help. It would give food for the goats and the people…. the cactus plants will survive in the heat… and the plants might well trap some of the blowing sand and organic debris… in time it might lead to deeper soils and a larger mass of plants, perhaps on the scale of thousands of acres this might help release enough water vapor to change the local environment.
MSNBC has a great article on the hazards the Gobi now faces…
There is an interesting book called ‘The Greening of Mars’. I highly recommend it for a glimpse into what technology might be able to do some time in the future. It also has some insights into the human mindset.
