Major fail: Star fruit (a.k.a Carambola) ice cream

There is a reason why you do not find certain flavours of ice cream being sold commercially. Never ever have I encountered star fruit-flavoured ice cream. Ever. (For jargon geeks, star fruit is also known as Carambola.)

So, the only way to find out how star fruit ice cream would taste like, I set out experimenting.

Oh boy. Major fail.

So here is a summary of how I went about doing it:

Step 1: Bought a ripe star fruit from the supermarket (those with some brown spots, but not too many).

Step 2: Trimmed off the tough edges, removed seeds and blended it in a blender with some sugar and water.

Step 3: Sieved the starfruit puree and sauteed the finely blended pulp till slightly gooey to remove any excess moisture.

Step 4: Created a simple ice cream custard using egg yolk (one whole yolk), cream (50ml), milk (50ml) and sugar (20g).

Step 5: Added starfruit puree just before allowing the whole mixture to set in freezer, and proceeded with hand whisking the ice cream.

When ice cream was set firm, it looked decent. Like how coconut ice cream looks like.

When I ate it, I thought, "My condolences..."

Moral of the story: Star fruit is a pale and mild fruit from the tropics. It tastes so mild and pale it should probably be eaten on its own. The cream and milk totally killed any remnants of star fruit. The only reminder of star fruit is the blended waxy pulp.

Maybe it'll work as a sorbet, but as an ice cream, it'll probably need a boost of essence or extract for it to work.