Cultivaro Amaro

The word nopal comes from the Nahuatl nōpalli — the language of the Aztecs. For over 10,000 years, Indigenous peoples of the Sonoran Desert depended on the tender young pads of the prickly pear as a food staple. Missionaries carried Opuntia ficus-indica north from central Mexico, planting them in the gardens of Tucson's historic barrios: clones of the same plants we harvest today from Mission Garden. In the amaro, they contribute a quiet chaparral background — a bounty of cut hay.

Citrus × aurantium, oldest orange in the Western world, carried from Asia by Arab traders in the 9th century and planted as ornamental trees in the courtyards of Moorish Spain. Spanish colonists brought them to the Americas, and eventually to the groves of Arcadia. Largely overlooked in American food culture, the sharply bitter citrus cuts cleanly through the richness of the dates and the butteriness of the pecans.

The Medjool date was nearly lost. In the 1920s, a fungal blight swept through Morocco's date palms, devastating the ancient groves. A USDA botanist rescued eleven offshoots from a single oasis and carried them to America, where they were quarantined for years before finding their home in the Colorado River delta: one of the only places on the continent where summer temperatures hold above 100 degrees for long enough to ripen them properly. The largest date farm in the Americas sits just south of Yuma. In the amaro, they bring a sensual, full-bodied sweetness.

The Algonquin word pacane, a nut requiring a stone to crack, gave us the word pecan. The only tree nut native to North America, Carya illinoinensis has been cultivated across the American South for centuries, prized for its rich, buttery meat. Ours come from the grounds of Holy Trinity Monastery in St. David, a Benedictine community whose orchard sits along the San Pedro River, the last undammed desert river in the American Southwest. We toast them, drawing out toffee and brown sugar, a richness that carries throughout.

Ponderosa pine is the largest evergreen conifer in the desert Southwest, growing up to 300 feet tall with a lifespan of 500 years or more. Walking among the giants on a warm day in northern Arizona, the bark smells sweet and complex, like butterscotch to some and Mexican wedding cookies to others. We use the inner bark, where that resinous quality translates into the amaro. We work with a miller in Flagstaff to collect what would be an otherwise waste product.