I grew up in Iowa, and never saw a cactus growing in the ground until I was probably at least 17. Now I'm a nopal evangelist. It's truly the plant we all need to be growing as much as possible. You can eat, you can drink it, you can
feed it to your livestock. You can make natural paint with a hard glossy finish with it, you can make biofuel from it, I even saw an article about making some sort of vegan leather for upholstery from it. It's also the host for cochineal insects--the god of all things red. It can survive drought conditions, and if you make sure it's got drainage it can also survive monsoons.
But why don't more non-Mexican people eat it?
Frankly, some people are afraid of it. Or maybe they tried it without really knowing what to do. Some might have bought those ones in the jar in the Mexican food section, seen the slime and said no way.
Others just need some guidance it doesn't really look like food to most North Americans.
I'm here to guide you because I've been initiated into Mexican, Oaxacan specifically, cooking and as I said, I'm now a nopal evangelist!
The first thing you need to know is that in Oaxaca, nopales are not prepared with table salt, sodium chloride, colloquially known as
sal fina here in Mexico. It's prepared with a mineral salt, known in Oaxaca as
sal blanca and known in central Mexico as
Tequesquite this salt's composition varies depending on where it is mined, but in addition to sodium chloride it also has sodium carbonate and sodium sulfate and potassium in varying amounts. The one that is produced near my house must have a fair amount of sodium carbonate as it tastes like a mix of baking soda and salt. I haven't tried it myself since I have the real thing but gourmet cooking sites say you can make a mix of 1 part baking soda to 3 parts salt to get a similar effect.
So if you are going to dice or slice nopales, you then need to rub this mineral salt or baking soda-salt mix onto the raw nopales. Then let them stand for about 10-20 minutes, this will draw out the slime. Let them stand in the pot you plan to cook them in, then once they are swimming in their slime, put them on the stove--DO NOT ADD ANY
WATER or oil. just cook them in the slime, moving continuously until the slime is mostly cooked off and the color of the nopales has changed.
You can eat nopales raw so there's no danger in undercooking them. Just keep them moving to avoid burning and stop then the texture is to your liking.
Grilling either on a grill or a griddle is also a great option. I've heard these called
campesino steaks. We will also use the salt-baking soda blend or Mexican mineral salt for this. For grilling you will just score the skin of the nopal, usually in diagonal lines across the pad, then again in the opposite direction. Not cutting all the way throw just through the outermost skin. Then rub with the salt mix and let stand. Once the salt has drawn the slime out you can pop it on the grill and cook as if it were a think cut of meat. One common thing is to cook once side and when you flip it to the other, pop some Oaxacan string cheese or maybe Monterrey jack cheese on the already cooked side.
Enjoy!
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