Recipe
Nopales a la mexicana (cactus pads)
- Herb:
- Prickly pear Opuntia ficus-indica
- Method:
- Culinary use
- Plant part:
- Leaf
About 25 minBeginnerRecipe science profile
Procedure
- Wearing gloves, scrape the young pads clean of spines and eyes with a knife, trim the edges and cut into strips.
- Boil 5–8 minutes in salted water with a little onion to shed the slime; drain and rinse.
- Fry onion, tomato and serrano chilli in a pan, add the nopales and sauté 5 minutes.
- Season with salt and coriander; serve with tortillas or in eggs and tacos.
Extraction
- Herb:
- 4 mladé články (asi 400 g) na 2 porce
- Solvent:
- krátké povaření v osolené vodě, potom restování
- Shelf life:
- 3 dny v lednici
- Target compounds:
- sliz (polysacharidy) odchází do vody; vláknina a minerály zůstávají v článku
Notes
A kitchen recipe; the only risk is the glochids — clean with gloves and scrape off every spine and 'eye' with a knife. The folk reputation of nopal 'for sugar' comes from small fibre studies, not from this dish.
Why it works
A short boil leaches out the mucilaginous polysaccharides that would otherwise make the dish sticky, while the fibre and minerals stay in the pad. The systematic review by Giraldo-Silva et al. summarises mostly preclinical data for the fruit; small human studies of nopal fibre and blood glucose are not taken as proof in this catalogue.
Literature
- Giraldo-Silva L, Ferreira B, Rosa E, Dias ACP (2023): Opuntia ficus-indica Fruit: A Systematic Review of Its Phytochemicals and Pharmacological Activities. Plants 12(3):543 — Systematický přehled složení plodů a převážně předklinických dat.
Related
Prickly pear — Herb card
Culinary use — Processing method detail