Fruit, vegetables and pulses

Prickly pear

Prickly pear: fragrant late-summer flesh inside a coat of spines

Native to Central America and long at home around the Mediterranean, the Opuntia grows in Puglia even on dry, stony ground and fruits from August to October. Nineteenth-century writers in Capitanata praised its small but fragrant fruit, and in the early twentieth century it was a source of wealth for Manfredonia. Since 2024 Italy has listed it as a traditional agri-food product (PAT).

• A fleshy, seed-filled berry of 150 to 400 grams, guarded by tufts of fine spines
• A light fruit: about 41 kilocalories per hundred grams of flesh
• Picked with a special tool so that it is never touched by hand

How to enjoy it. First deal with the spines: half an hour in water, a scrub with gloves on, a rinse; then score the skin, cut off both ends and eat the flesh fresh. Tradition also turns it into jam and liqueur.

Production areas

Apulia

Season

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