Yucca Fruit Pickles: How to Prepare the Edible Seed Pods

Your next summer pickling adventure awaits. Yucca fruit pickles are made from the young, green seed pods of yucca plants. They just need to be soaked, peeled, and brined to become a crisply intriguing addition to your favorite pickle platter. Yuccas are strikingly structural native perennials that are relatively cold-hardy as well as drought-tolerant, a tough combination that makes them an appealing choice for low-maintenance gardens in a challenging and changing climate. They are also edible. Since it is unlikely that anyone you are feeding will have eaten yucca fruit pickles before, there will be immediate questions. And a small cloud of confusion. 

You will need answers, clarity, and a recipe. Read on!

All yuccas (and their agave cousins) share edible traits via their immature stems, flowers, and fruit. You can read a previous story about eating yucca stems and flowers here: Yucca: An Edible and Resilient Plant.

Speaking of eating, about that small cloud of confusion: Yucca versus yuca. Yucca is the botanical name for a genus of plants in the Asparagaceae family; they have spike-tipped leaves growing in a rosette, with tall, candelabra-like heads of flowers, and squat seed pods (and yes, their central stalks when immature look just like giant asparagus).

Yuca, on the other hand, is one of the common names of a different edible plant, the tropical shrub Manihot esculenta, whose imposing and starchy brown-skinned tuber is also known as cassava or manioc. It is in no way related to yucca.

In New York, where I live, the species we see commonly along sandy shorelines and in disturbed ground is Yucca filamentosa. While it is native to southeastern North America, it has escaped cultivation and has naturalized into New England and the Midwest.

After their tall stalks have bloomed effusively in early summer, the moth-pollinated yucca flowers transform gradually into gherkin-shaped seed pods. Years ago, those gherkins (South African and British English for a small, pickled cucumber) gave me ideas, which were borne out by a sweet foraging book by Billy Joe Tatum, Wild Foods Field Guide and Cookbook. A summer pickling tradition began.

Inside the green capsules are flattened seeds packed into neat, double-rowed, tripartite compartments. While those seeds are still pure white, they are tender and juicy; at this stage the entire pod can be pickled, or eaten as a cooked vegetable. The only caveat is this: Yucca pods must be peeled, since any remaining green parts are bitter. Raw, the peeled pod tastes little like green beans meeting a slightly bitter cucumber.