Ways to cook food vary widely across the world and are unique to environments and cultural traditions. Mexican cooks skilfully prepare a variety of tasty nopalito dishes, but it is an unknown vegetable to South African cooks. For new ingredients to be introduced successfully in a community, cooking instructions and locally acceptable recipes must be available. The texture of nopalitos and green pepper (comparable vegetable) prepared using different cooking methods at different times was tested to identify the best cooking practices for nopalitos. ‘Morado’ and green pepper samples (six replications) were boiled (2, 10 and 20 min) in a water bath at 85˚C, shallow fried (2 and 5 min) at 150˚C, microwaved cooked (2 and 5 min) at 800 Watts and roasted (10 and 15 min) at 180 ˚C. A Brookfield CT3 Texture Analyzer was used in penetration test (probe TA Cylinder), for hardness (g), hardness work (mJ) and deformation (mm) and in tension tests (roller cam grip) for peak load (g) on a fixture table TA-CJ. Roasting and shallow frying significantly decreased (p < 0.001) hardness (g) and hardness work (mJ) values from raw samples, but there were no differences between 10 and 15 min roasting and 2 and 5 min shallow frying. Boiling significantly (p < 0.001) lowered values from raw samples, after 20 min, a significant difference (p < 0.001) was only observed in the harness work (mJ) values. After 1 min of microwave cooking, values lowered, but at 2 and 5 min, the hardness increased. In contrast, green pepper samples softened consistently with increased cooking times. Microwave cooking was not recommended, while minimum cooking times for grilling, boiling, and shallow frying were recommended. The knowledge obtained here was instrumental in developing cooking instructions and nopalito recipes for the South African consumer (https://www.ufs.ac.za/cactuspear).