Extracting the Sweetness of the Saguaro

a pancake with saguaro syrup on top

Sure, sure, there's that saying, “slow as molasses,” but what about “slow as saguaro”? I'm sure a phrase like that exists in the Papago language, but it simply never caught on in English. But saguaro syrup is certainly slower than molasses.

The syrup itself doesn't have that kind of thick, gooey viscosity, but since the cactus doesn't even produce fruit until it is about forty years old, and harvesting it takes forever ... it IS the slowest food I know.

For the Papago, saguaro fruit and syrup were important sources of calories at a time each year when the desert wouldn't produce much else. However, after all of the hours I spent harvesting in the hot sun—not to mention scooping and boiling and straining—I ended up with only two pints of syrup. This syrup is very labor intensive. I can see why the practice of making it is going extinct.

“… the cactus doesn't even produce fruit until it is about forty years old, and then harvesting it takes forever.”

Saguaro blooms in the spring, like most of the other cactus of the Sonoran desert. But the plant's fruit doesn't begin to ripen until June. As a fruit becomes completely ripe, the outer skin splits open like the petals of a flower to let the pulp and seeds drop to the ground. Seeing this, the first conquistadors wrote that saguaros had red flowers that bloomed in June.

The saguaro in the photo is just beginning to ripen. The Tohono O'Odam people would gather the fruits with a tool made from a saguaro rib with a short piece of greasewood tied at an angle to it. This tool was used to push or pull the ripe fruit from the cactus, although they would also gather dried pulp from the ground when possible.

Harvesting saguaro fruit.

After trying the traditional tool, I decided that my telescopic pool pole with a metal bolt coming out of the side where the net is usually attached was a much better way to harvest the fruit. Even with my new and improved tool, though, it takes hours and hours just to fill a five gallon bucket halfway. To make matters worse, August is the hottest time of the year here—right before the monsoons come to cool things down a bit.

Because of the weather, you can only harvest for a few hours early in the morning. The pulp has to be removed from the shell, which luckily doesn't have spines. The shell or husk is discarded. The process is quick, but in the end you realize how much of your fruit was actually husk as two and a half gallons turns into about one and a quarter.

The pulp is boiled until it turns slightly orange. Then the fibrous pulp and seeds are separated from the juice by straining the mixture through cheesecloth. There are thousands of seeds in each fruit, all connected by pulp. Therefore, the amount of product you have left at this point is once again diminished quite a bit. The juice is then returned to the pot, where it boils until it starts to thicken up and stick to the spoon. It doesn't ever get thick like maple syrup.

These fruits have started to split open.

At the end of all the harvesting, scooping, straining, and boiling, I have only two pints of syrup. The Papago used this syrup to sweeten everything through the summer while food variety was slim. It tastes very sweet, but has a very subtle medicinal aftertaste, reminiscent of cough syrup, which makes it less tasty than other fruit syrups. But we still like it on pancakes!