Coconuts feature in many different kinds of cooking and you can make both savory and sweet recipes with them. Grated coconut can be added to a soup or stew, to give it an eastern flavor. It can be used to top cakes and cheesecake recipes.
The coconut milk is both a thickener and a flavoring agent for certain Thai, Japanese, and African recipes and it can also be used to make cocktails and other creamy drinks. A lot of people avoid buying fresh coconut because they are unsure how to prepare it, so the following tips should be very useful.
Coconut
How to Open a Coconut
Monkeys open coconuts by throwing them at rocks, which is not a bad method! Do not be concerned about losing the liquid if you try this approach because this is not the milk that you use to cook with. A coconut can break into three or four pieces when you throw it at something to break it.
Another way of opening a coconut is to pierce the eyes using a screwdriver or ice pick. Drain the liquid out of the holes, and then cook the coconut in a 400 degrees F oven for twenty minutes. Next, wrap it in a towel and then hit it with a hammer. The shell should loosen and break into pieces. Pick out the white flesh and pare the dark skin off.
How to Grate Coconut Flesh
The easiest way to grate the white flesh of a coconut is to use a grater or the grating disk in your food processor. Two coconuts should give you seven cups of grated coconut. You can store this for a couple of days in the refrigerator.
How to Get Coconut Milk from a Coconut
Many people believe that the clear juice that runs out of a coconut when you break it or pierce the eyes is the coconut milk, but this is not true. The coconut milk is made when you combine grated coconut with the milk inside the coconut.
Mix a few cups of grated coconut with the milk of the coconut in a heavy pot. A good guideline is to use three quarters of a cup of loosely packed, grated coconut per cup of coconut milk. Heat the mixture slowly until it reaches a simmer, and then let it cool down. Strain the coconut milk through a sieve, pressing down to squeeze all the liquid out of the grated pieces of coconut. You can squeeze it through a towel to get every last drop.
Another way to make coconut milk is to combine the scooped out white flesh from a coconut with a cup and a half of hot water in a blender. Process the mixture in the blender until it is smooth. You can vary the amount of water to use, if you want thicker or thinner coconut milk. Strain the coconut milk through a cheesecloth, and then wring the cheesecloth to get all the coconut milk out.
Preparing Fresh Coconut - Some Handy Tips
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