dried starfruit
Describing the simple step-by-step process of drying guava at home with a food dehydrator.
Food: Starfruit
Prep Time: 3 minutes
Dehydrate Time: 19 hours
Total Time: 19 hours 3 minutes
Starfruit is actually called carambola, but I have never heard anyone called it that…because why would you when they are shaped like that.
drying starfruit
starfruit
I rarely see people selling starfruit at the market, but my friend happened to have some and gave me two. To be honest, I don’t actually like to eat starfruit, but I thought it would look quite nice when dried like…well…stars. So, I accepted the starfruits and took them home for drying.
I used two whole starfruits for dehydration.
preparing starfruit
To prepare the starfruits for dehydration, I washed and cut them into slices that are about 1cm thick. I didn’t cut away the peel and seeds. I have seen on the Internet some people cut off the edges of the starfruits or remove the seeds, but I didn’t think these steps are necessary. Also, I didn’t bother with the step of placing the fruit into lemon juice or salt water to prevent oxidation because I don’t think that is needed.
The starfruit slices went straight on the dehydrating trays.
Preparing the starfruits is really simple and only takes about 3 minutes.
drying starfruit
According to the manual, fruits should be dried at 55-60°C. There weren’t detailed instructions on this particular fruit on the manual, so I just turned off the machine when they looked dry enough.
I left the dehydrator on overnight and made sure to swap the trays for even dehydration. I dried the starfruit slices for about 19 hours. During dehydration, starfruit gave off a really faint smell compared to other fruits, and for some reason, it smells kind of salty.
dried starfruit
The dried starfruit slices looked nice as expected, but perhaps they would look even prettier if I had taken the extra step of preventing their oxidation because the peel had really turned brown.
The texture of the dried starfruit is soft with the pointed edges being quite hard, so perhaps cutting off the edges of the starfruit before drying would better. Personally, I think dried starfruits taste better than the fresh ones. Also, I don’t know why, but they seem to taste a bit salty.
