The Sicilian Spirit Made with Cactus

Giuseppe La Fauci learned from mezcal makers in Oaxaca, then went home to distill the prickly pear pads that grow all over Sicily. Across Sicily, prickly pear cacti crowd roadsides and slopes above the sea, their overlapping pads dotted with yellow, orange, and red fruit. They are so familiar on the island that their shapes and colors appear on Caltagirone ceramics and painted Sicilian carts. We’ve come a long way from the rice fields outside Seoul, where our last installment left us. A small Japanese-Korean restaurant in the capital was meant to be next, but our inquiries went unanswered, and Food Chain had to take a detour. We landed on the largest island in the Mediterranean. Giuseppe La Fauci, the son of a master distiller in Valdina, near Milazzo, had long marveled at how much prickly pear grew in Sicily. In autumn, vendors at food markets sell the large, succulent fruit known as bastardoni, or “big bastards.” But what could he do with the pads? His first idea was to infuse them in a neutral spirit, then distill it. “But I didn’t want to make a gin with cactus,” he says. “I wanted to make a spirit entirely from the cactus itself.” La Fauci began fermenting the pads in batches of just two or three liters, unsure whether they would yield anything worth distilling. “I was experimenting and studying at the same time.” When he showed his importers a photograph of the experiments, they invited him to Mexico. In Oaxaca, he learned how mezcal was made from agave, then returned to Sicily to try the process with the plant he had grown up seeing everywhere. Continue reading Access this and all our other premium articles by joining our membership program. Plans start at $6.50 per month and include twice-weekly digital features, access to in-person events, and more.