Experimenting with local ingredients
There are many cactus ice vendors concentrated in the area near the Penghu Great Bridge. “23.5 Cactus Sorbet,” located in downtown Magong City, not only has a shop with a very impressive style, they have developed gelato whose mouthfeel is different from traditional ice cream. The brightly colored frozen desserts are very attractive to customers, and many girls bring out their cell phones to take selfies while holding up their ice cream cones and smiling sweetly.
The original aim of this shop, which now has a noticeable online presence, was in fact simply to recreate the “tapioca pearl ice” (shaved ice with tapioca balls) that owner Xie Yuling enjoyed as a child. But as a result of recommendations from experienced friends, she decided to take the path of developing “cactus pearls,” and has never looked back.
The color of prickly pear juice fades if the juice is heated. The purple-red pearls turn brown after being boiled for six minutes at 100°C, losing the unique hue of the cactus fruit.
To preserve the color, Xie and her partner let their imaginations run free and decided to blend the cactus fruit, complete with peel and seeds, into juice, and boil it down into a concentrate, 26 times more concentrated than the original juice, which they then heated to dry it into powder to make “pearls.” Their experiment worked, but the finished product was quite expensive to prepare, costing NT$7,200 per kilogram of powder.
“It was madness!” Each time Xie thinks back on this journey, she can’t believe it herself. Yet, despite the problems, she always courageously pressed ahead. Because she didn’t want her cactus pearls to end up as a flavoring in inexpensive custom-mixed soft drinks, she decided to instead use them for shaved ice products, scattering the ruby-red pearls on top of the ice so that customers would take special note of these hard-to-make “gems.”
The cactus ice at 23.5 is made simply from fruit juice, water, and sugar, without any added emulsifier. Hence it doesn’t have the thick, sticky texture of ice cream. When you eat a spoonful, you will first feel the solidity and fine granularity of the ice, which quickly turns into fruit juice, leaving a light fruity fragrance in the mouth.
Besides purple-red cactus gelato, the shop also offers a light green seaweed flavor and a light brown fengru tea flavor (fengru is the herb Glossocardia bidens). These three flavors are all made using special local products of Penghu. Back in the day, Xie Yuling decided to try taking some dairy ice cream that she had just made and dipping it into powdered seaweed; the two seemingly contradictory flavors turned out to be surprisingly harmonious. Meanwhile, fengru tea, which has a watery texture, did not seem suited for making ice products, but after Xie spent three days repeatedly boiling and chilling her mixture, it finally became viscous.
With these natural ingredients and complex preparation, costs are naturally high. But Xie has kept her margins very small in order to stay competitive in the market. This is why she is still repaying loans although her shop has been operating for seven years. Even her mother says with a laugh: “When most people open an ice shop, within two years they’re driving a Mercedes Benz, but you’re still paying off debt.” However, even though the shop is not what you could call prospering economically, the optimistic Xie persists in promoting delicious local flavors while also teaching dance part time.
The purple walls of Yi-Jia Cactus Ice represent the cactus fruit.