Eating Prickly Pear Cactus Pads (Nopales)

One of the foods I discovered after coming to Mexico were nopales.
I absolutely love eating nopales. I think taste-wise, honestly, they are just okay, but I love that I can walk outside any time of the year and cut my dinner off a plant. If they are prepared right they can be delicious, but the taste is mostly coming from what they are paired with.

Many people who try to eat nopales and don't like them, say they don't like them because they are slimy--there's a fix for that. You need to first score the surface of the nopal, and rub it with ideally, a mineral salt that has a high carbon content, if you don't have that available you can substitute baking soda. (Sodium bicarbonate) and let it sit 10-20 minutes, this will draw it's "juice" out.

The easiest way to cook it is roasted. Here you can see us roasting them on the comal (griddle) with quesadillas with squash flowers.

Have you eaten nopales? Would you like some more recipes?
(I can post some on Monday, as I'm off to the village for the weekend.)

I also like them grilled whole like you show.  In the stores here they sell baggies of fresh diced nopales, those are good to cook like okra:

Dredge in seasoned cornmeal (add a small amount of bean flour too, if you have it).  Use just enough meal that the pieces are well-coated, and there is still a little bit of loose meal at the bottom. Better too little meal than too much. Let sit awhile, maybe 10 minutes. Coat the bottom of cast-iron skillet with oil, heat it medium high. Dump in whole bowl of nopalitos and meal. Let cook without stirring until bottom is browned. Flip over a spatula-full at a time. Keep cooking until second side is browned.

This is how I remember Alton Brown cooking okra once. I do it often with nopalitos.

Another favorite recipe of mine is Fajitas of nopales, al chipotle.
I used canned chipotles and canned sun-dried tomatoes slice both into strips, also slice onions and nopales into strips. Rub the nopal strips with salt and baking soda and let stand for about 10 minutes. Then add onions onto a griddle or large cast-iron pan, when they start to brown add nopales when the nopales are about half brown toss in the chipotles and sun-dried tomatoes adding a bit of the sauce each comes in as well. Move until the nopales are evenly cooked. Enjoy with tortillas and black beans.

Most of the time I eat nopales they are canned, pickled ones, not slimy at all. But even fresh I haven't found them to be particularly like okra. My kids mother-in-law has recently gifted me with nopales pads for planting. I'm hoping that they will survive. I have some prickly pear already but they aren't doing well. I think the last owner dropped a lot of rock on them.

As far as eating canned, pickled ones, we usually make a salad with oil, lime juice, tomato, chiles, onions, garlic, queso fresco, and depending on whether my youngest is here or not sometimes cilantro. They have that soap/cilantro thing, so when they are eating we usually sub parsley.

The only way I have eaten cactus pads was with scrambled eggs.  The cactus pads tasted like green beans to me.

I like them quite a bit!  THe fruits make good wine, too.

I enjoy nopales. I've had them fresh and canned. I was blessed, growing up, to have lived in an area with a very high Latin presence, with excellent restaurants and quite a few Latino friends, whose moms & abuelitas were amazing, generous cooks, so I've had them in tacos, eggs, real Mexican- made breakfast wraps, and fajitas, and as a side, with quesadillas, rice, beans, fresh maize tortillas... YUM!!

I once made a pan of enchiladas stuffed with nopalitos and cheddar. My husband still talks about it!