Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Great Coconut Milk Experiment

Coconut.  One of the (many) beautiful things about eating Paleo!  The only difficulty is finding unadulterated coconut products, especially coconut milk.  So, I decided to make my own.


With Bruce's help, we husked two of the three coconuts given to me by my friend and co-worker, Gina.  It has been difficult to find mature coconuts because everyone wants the water these days.  After several false starts, her and her husband provided us with THESE beauties.


We have worked out a trade deal - they give us coconuts, we give them avocados.  I like it!  The picture above shows one coconut with the husk still on, and two without.  Once you husk them you need to use them - they can leak or rot quickly.


These we just perfect - plenty of milky white flesh.


It's not easy getting the meat out of the shell.  If this was a Top Chef quickfire, I would have lost.  I've got to research to find an easier way to do this.


Here is the meat - don't worry about the dark peel - it doesn't impact the taste of the milk.


Put it all in the VitaMix and blend with enough hot water to make a slurry.


The slurry going into the nut milk bag.


Squeeze out all of the milk - use a nut milk bag instead of cheesecloth.  They work great!


The finished product!  It is delicious to drink just by itself over ice, blended into a smoothie, or used for many Paleo recipes that call for coconut milk.

I'm spoiled now, and only want fresh.  The trick will be to maintain a 1-2 per week supply of mature coconuts.  You'd think they'd be all over the place on an island, but apparently they are one of Maui's best kept secrets.

3 comments:

  1. yum, that looks good! Kind of ironic you can't find coconuts in Maui. I guess they are in really high demand.

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  2. I am impressed! And amazed that you can't find coconuts in Maui! But hunting them down sounds well worth it.

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  3. Heh - you think it's hard finding coconuts in Maui? Try doing it in Oregon! ;-) I read somewhere about making coconut milk with organic, unsweetened, dried flakes, but I haven't tried it yet. That'll be my next paleo experiment! (PS - this is GLC from BT)

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