Star Fruit- Handy, Healthy Snack, with Medical Alerts

If there ever was a fruit with an obvious name, it's star fruit! Cut the yellow five-ribbed fruit crosswise, and there you have a golden star. It's easy for fun and quick snacks, keeps well, and is available almost all year. But is there more you should know?

The star fruit (Averrhoa carambola) was originally grown in Sri Lanka and the Spice Islands of Indonesia (Moluccas). For several hundred years it was grown in Southeast Asia. It is also known as star apple, five-angled fruit, bilimbi, belimbing, coromandel gooseberry, kamranga, and Chinese star fruit. It needs a tropical climate for growth, and is now cultivated in both Hawaii and Florida in the United States.

Carambola is a small tree (15 feet), and can even be grown as a container plant when young. The biggest difficulty with growing it this way is that it requires a great deal of moisture and heat. The blossoms of the tree are bright pink and showy.

There are actually two kinds of star fruit, tart and sweet. The tart ones have thin ribs and the sweeter ones have thicker ribs, although the taste is very hard to distinguish. Either type progresses from tarter to sweeter as it ripens. When the skin is a clear waxy yellow, and the angles of the ribs are beginning to brown the fruit is ripe. You can ripen it at room temperature (turning it occasionally will help it to ripen evenly) and then place the fruits in the refrigerator to keep them for about a week. This is the recommended storage time, but I've had good luck keeping them longer, since I like them best when they are really ripe.

The texture is crisp, but not as crunchy as an apple- more like slightly unripe melon. The taste is difficult to describe. I would call it pineapple-melon, but written descriptions throw in a hint of plum.

An average star fruit is about 5 ounces, and has around 45 calories. It is an excellent source of Vitamin C, with 38 mg Omega 3 and 220 mg of Omega 6.

There are very few seeds in a star fruit, they don't need peeling, and they are not too juicy, making it a great finger food. It's a ready made garnish for everything from fruit salads to meat and fish. They are soft enough to blend well in fruit smoothies.

They also dehydrate into wonderful lunch box snacks, but don't dry a lot for future use because they will turn black in just a few weeks!

There are two serious medical warnings associated with carambola:

Patients with renal failure must not eat even small portions of star fruit. The fruit contains a neurotoxin which can cross the blood-brain barrier in persons with renal disease. This causes a complication known as fruit intoxication which can include various and bizarre symptoms, and even death. ¹ There is no effective treatment.

Like grapefruit, star fruit contains an enzyme which will increase the effective dosage of certain medications such as statins. If you are taking a drug such as Lipitor and have been advised to not eat grapefruit, you should also not eat star fruit. ²

1. PubMed.gov

2. Indiana University School of Medicine