Carambola & Goat’s Cheese Salad
To celebrate my last day in the beautiful coastal town of Lo De Marcos in Mexico, I couldn’t resist using the carambola fruit I’d been eyeing up for weeks in a tree in the main square.
This is a super easy recipe (consisting mainly of peeling, slicing, and dicing), but what it lacks in complexity it wallops in flavour, and brings together some of the wonderful ingredients that I’ve tasted on my travels.
Ingredients (serves 4)
80g raw almonds
1 red onion
2 limes
1 chilli
4 carambola / star fruit*
6 tomatillos**
2 avocados
2 mangoes
1 cucumber
Coriander
1 orange
150g soft goat’s cheese
Olive oil
Salt
Roughly chop the almonds, toast in a pan until golden brown and leave to cool.
Finely slice the onion and set aside in a bowl with a pinch of salt, the juice of one lime, and a deseeded and finely diced chilli.
Slice the carambola into stars, the tomatillos into rounds, and the avocado lengthways. Roughly chop the coriander.
Peel the mangoes and slice into strips. Peel the cucumber, slice lengthways, scoop out the seeds and cut in to half-moon shapes.
Assemble the dish using layers – mango, cucumber, onion and chilli pickle, carambola, avocado, tomatillo, a scattering of coriander, good pinch of salt, juice of half the orange and half the remaining lime, then repeat. Save a few carambola slices to decorate the top.
Crumble over the goat’s cheese and toasted almonds, and drizzle with some good olive oil.
*Carambola ripen from very sharp (green), to sweet (orange) - I used a combination of both.
** Tomatillos are available pretty much everywhere in Mexico, but trickier to find fresh in the UK. If you can’t source any, use physalis / cape gooseberries instead - these are in the same family and have a similar flavour, just double up the quantity.