ABSTRACT
The carambola should be washed well and deseeded before consumption. The fruit is delicious eaten out of hand (peeling is not necessary) and is also added to salads, curries, tarts, and other desserts, beverages, relishes, chutneys, puddings, stews, and candy, and is made into jams, jellies, preserves, and liquor. Green fruits are sometimes consumed as a vegetable or (as noted earlier) made into pickles. If cooked, this should be done for a short time only to preserve the §avor. The taste ranges from pleasantly tart and sour to slightly sweet. The juice has been described as sweet and apple like. Sweet types are used in salads, jellies, and other preparations where a sweet taste is desirable, whereas sour types are typically used in condiments. The fruit bruises easily and is often packaged by workers wearing rubber gloves. Carambola stores for up to a month in the refrigerator, or 2 weeks at room temperature. The sour types can contain 15 times as much oxalic acid as the sweet types and indeed have amounts comparable with those of high-oxalic plant foods such as spinach and rhubarb. Because of the high acidity and the danger of leaching ions into food, high-oxalic foods should not be cooked in aluminum, copper, or iron containers (stainless steel is recommended). Unripe fruit is green, half-ripe fruit is typically lemon-green, and very ripe fruit is a golden yellow. Good-quality carambola in a market is fairly rm, and the skin will be yellow with no green tinges, although slight browning along the edges is normal. (Slight browning on the fruit angles can be pared away; however, fruit with brown patches should not be purchased.)
FIGURE 18.1 Carambola (Averrhoa carambola), §owering branch, with a fruit at upper left. (From Lamarck and Poiret, 1744-1829, plate 385.)
• Camaranga is a jam or other food preparation made with carambola (kamaranga is an Asian name for the carambola).
