A Thorny Recipe: Prickly Pear Cactus Dressing
I often treat cooking as a mad science experiment. I find a food I haven’t tried much before, and see what I can do with it. This is how I sometimes end up with things like hot pink salad dressing.
I recently acquired some prickly pear cactus fruits. My previous experience with this fruit — known in Spanish as tuna — involved consuming a cactus fruit ice cream from a stall at Mercado la Paloma in downtown Los Angeles, and once trying to eat slices of the fruit raw, which I did not enjoy because of the hard little seeds. The flavor of the fruit is a bit like a mild mix of berry, melon, and cucumber.
This time, after browsing several web sites, I decided to try making a salad dressing from the prickly pear fruits. I scanned the other recipes but then invented my own:
- Peel the prickly pear fruits. Cut into chunks. Puree. Strain.
- Combine: 1/2 cup of this prickly pear puree (from about 3 fruits), 3 Tablespoons lime juice (from about 3 limes), 1/2 tsp sugar, about 1/3 cup canola oil, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, 1/2 teaspoon salt. I used the blender. Taste and adjust.
- ( I think if you stopped after the sugar and added tequila, triple sec, and ice, you might be on the way to a decent prickly pear margarita. But I didn’t try that).
Once I got it into my mind to make this dressing, I decided to make a salad of other Mexican/Southwestern fall ingredients. Using produce from the farmers’ market, I made a salad of:
- Red leaf lettuce
- Chopped jicama. I recently acquired a vegetable peeler with a serrated blade designed for soft produce with thin skins. It made short work of peeling the jicama, though with all those sharp little teeth on the blade, I had to be much more cautious about my fingers than I would with an ordinary peeler.
- Sliced radishes. I used the mandoline I got for Christmas, which made neat, thin slices, though I’m not sure it saved time over slicing them with a knife.
- Kernels of Corn. To cook corn easily, place a full ear of unshucked corn in the microwave and cook on high for 3 minutes. Then shuck it. Thanks, Jessica, for teaching me this method!
- Roasted, salted pepitas (pumpkin/squash seeds)
- Crumbled queso fresco (A Mexican cheese somewhat similar to feta)
- Julienned carrots
Here’s the thing: this dressing is bright pink. I think it may not have helped that I made it in the blender, which made it extra emulsified.
That combination of ingredients makes an excellent salad. The slight sweetness and tanginess of the prickly pears give the dressing a complimentary flavor. The dressing and the salad taste good together… if you can get over the fact that it is all oozing with hot pink.
I actually tried making a traditional vinaigrette with red wine vinegar (which is pink too!) and eating it on the same salad. That looked normal, and probably would have tasted good to me, if I hadn’t already sampled the delicious and revolting cactus fruit dressing.