prickly pears

August 2012- I got the wild idea to make prickly pear jelly this year.  There were just so many of them this year in the pasture and they seemed to be bigger and darker than the few years previous.  I don't even like jelly but I love a prickly pear margarita so I figured I might as well give it a shot and add it to my line up of canned goods to enter in the fair.

Here they are after picking.  The spots on each of the 'pears' is actually a cluster of teeny, tiny spears that will really bother you once they are in your skin. So I enlisted Casey's help to torch them all for me.  He loves to fire up that burner any chance he can get.  

I wasn't sure how many I would need so I filled two buckets.  It was more than enough.

Picking them was the easy part.  Torching them wasn't too difficult, just time consuming.  But peeling them to get the juice out, now that was a job.  I consulted several on-line sources and all agreed that putting them in boiling water for a minute or two would help soften the skin.  But it didn't really work very well for me.  The skin is very, very thin.  And it is very strongly attached to a thin layer of 'meat' which surrounds the center pod of seeds.  The seeds feel like tiny little rocks.  My intention was to peel and discard the skins, separate the meat from the seeds and strain them.  

It didn't go as planned.  So instead I peeled as much of the skin as I could, then cooked the mix of meat and seeds with a small amount of water.  After that I used a fine mesh strainer and collected the juice that came through it.  Then I took the strained pulp and seed pods and put them into a large piece of cheese cloth and squeezed as much of the beautiful magenta juice out of it as I could.  I did two large batches of it and got a little more than 3 cups of juice out of each batch...more than I thought I would.  And it tasted very good- kind of tart but sweet at the same time.  I mixed some in a glass of lemonade and it was delicious.

My first batch only made this much jelly {one pint jar and two mini jelly jars}.  Kind of a lot of work for not very much jelly.  But it was a beautiful color and jelled exactly like it was supposed to.  

The recipe was simple.  Just the prickly pear juice, sugar and a bit of lemon juice and liquid pectin.  

But it sure makes for a sinkful of dirty dishes!  My mom always taught me to "clean as you go" when cooking.  I never learned and always have a big mess to clean at the end.

Here's more jars after the second and third batch. I didn't even get a ribbon for it at the fair.  If I attempt this again I think I'm just going to do one batch of jelly and use the rest of the juice for margaritas!