Lilies

Palms

• Types of Coconut
• Buying and Storing Coconuts
• Preparing Coconut
• Coconut Products
  • Coconut Milk, Cream & Water
  • Dried Coconut
  • Coconut Oil - seed of controversy.
• Recipes
• Links - to information on Coconuts.

Shown are the three forms whole coconuts are sold in: fresh (left, 5 inches diameter, 2-1/3 pounds, very full), brown (front, 4-3/4 inches diameter, 1-3/4 pounds, still quite full) and fresh young (right 5 inches diameter, 2-1/2 pounds).

Fresh Coconut and Brown Coconut are bought for the white flesh (called "copra") they contain. A fresh coconut still has a lot of water in it, palatable, but not as sweet as that of the fresh young coconut. The brown coconut will have less water and that water will be even less sweet, but still drinkable if there is a lot of it. The flesh of the brown coconut is harder and has a more intense flavor than that of the fresh coconut which is too soft and light in flavor for many recipes, and particularly for making coconut milk.

Fresh Young Coconuts are sold for the water they contain which is sweeter and more flavorful than that of older coconuts. They are trimmed as shown and a lot of the weight is wet fiber. They should be sold tightly wrapped in plastic film to retain moisture. The shell is still too soft to stand the fiber being ripped off, and the flesh is thin and so soft you can eat it with a spoon. The flesh has much less flavor and sweetness than that of a mature coconut. They are often sold by street vendors with a hole punched into them for a straw.

Mutant Gelatinous Coconut [Macapuno, kopyor] This coconut is available in the Philippines and Indonesia where it is used for various desserts. It may be found preserved in syrup in stores catering to Philippine communities. The flesh of this coconut does not harden but stays gelatinous.

• IF you really must have a coconut, buy a spare to make sure you have a good one - its cheap insurance and if you don't use it you can always eat it.
• Don't buy brown coconuts that don't still slosh when you shake them - the more water the better. A dry coconut is a moldy or rotten coconut.
• Fresh Coconuts can be so full of water they barely slosh at all. I have purchased some that were really a bit too young with meat that was still rather soft. They should probably have enough air in them to slosh well.
• Don't buy a coconut (fresh or brown) that's bleeding at the eyes, it's rotten inside. The brown coconut in the photo looked just fine in the store but proved to have just a little seep at one eye. It was rotten.
• Don't buy a coconut with a crack in the shell, it's probably moldy inside.

Preparing coconuts for use is simple but requires a bit of mechanical dexterity and strength. If you don't feel up to it have someone accustomed to using tools do it (some husbands are good for this, but others will just injure themselves).

Yield: A mature coconut should yield about 12 oz of copra (coconut meat) after shelling and peeling off the brown backing. This is equivalent to about 4 oz dried coconut. Dried grated coconut runs about 4 oz to one cup lightly packed so a whole coconut will be about 1 cup of dried grated coconut. So if an Indian recipe calls for "1/2 dried coconut grated", figure about 2 oz of dried grated coconut or 6 oz of fresh.

A fresh coconut will also yield about 1-1/2 cups of coconut water which is rarely used in recipes, so it's for the cook. Pour it into a 2 cup glass measuring cup and chill it up in the freezer with a judicious dollop of chilled vodka poured in. It'll improve your disposition and nobody'll suspect a thing, "Its just coconut water".

Here are the steps for preparing a coconut, but for more detail and pictures see my page Coconut Milk page.

1. Use a 3/8 inch drill bit and drill through an eye (the weakest point - three eyes are found at the stem end). Pour out the water through the hole. Lacking a drill, use a hammer to pound a large phillips screwdriver through an eye. The water must be clear and colorless - if it has any color at all your coconut is rotten. For a reasonably fresh coconut the water should be pleasant to drink.
2. At this point, if it's convenient, you could put the coconut in a preheated oven at 350°F/177°C for 20 minutes. This will loosen the flesh from the shell making it easier to remove and will likely crack the coconut making it much easier to open.
3. Place the coconut on a strong hard surface and wrap a towel around it to make it easy to hold in place. Careful how you hold it because a hammer blow may open a crack that springs shut and could pinch your skin - so use the towel. If you don't have a coconut grater you'll probably want to break it into several pieces.
4. IF you have a real coconut grater, you can just grate the coconut out of the shell (most recipes call for grated coconut anyway) and you're ready to cook - but you probably don't have a real coconut grater, hand cranked or otherwise, so you'll have to go through a few more steps.


5. Now comes the hard part - prying the flesh out of the shell. By far the best and safest tool is a dull 1/2 inch wood chisel (bevel side to the shell) but a short strong knife like an oyster knife will do. In any case the objective is to not stab yourself in the process. Be careful.
6. Once you have the flesh out, use a vegetable peeler to peel off the brown skin that came out with the flesh.
7. At this point the coconut flesh can be let dry a bit, then wrapped and stored in the refrigerator for up to a week. Longer and it will get moldy.
8. Most recipes call for grated coconut. Because the pieces break up easily a flat grater is more likely to produce bloody knuckles than grated coconut. For small quantities you can use a rotary grater with a flapper to push the coconut pieces against the drum, either an attachment for you mixer (preferred) or a hand rotary grater (like a cheese grater). You may have to clean the drum a couple of times because it clogs and you'll lose some coconut because when pieces get thin enough they slip around the drum. Best use a "mini-prep" food processor or the sharp blade in your regular food processor long enough to get a really fine cut.
9. Depending on the recipe you may want to chop grated coconut to make it finer or grind it with a mortar and pestle (or if you used the sharp blade of your food processor just let it run until it's as fine as you can get it).

Fresh Young Coconut will keep a week or so, but since the whole objective is the fresh juice inside, you want to minimize storage - the longer the storage the less juice. If kept moist the fiber on the outside will mold, and since the shell is very soft mold could penetrate to the flesh and juice. If you keep it dry it'll dry out.

The water is a little less clear than from a mature coconut and it's comparatively very sweet. If you split the coconut open you can eat the flesh with a spoon. It is thin, in some areas it may be so thin you can see shell through it as in the photo specimen. The jelly like flesh is pleasant enough to eat but it can't be used in any normal coconut recipe because the flavor is just too light.

1. Take a 3/8 inch drill bit and drill two holes, anywhere, or punch through with a hammer and phillips screwdriver (the shell is soft). Pour out the water and put it in the fridge to chill.
2. The proper way to open a fresh young coconut is to set it on a stump and slash it cleanly through with a single stroke of a machete. My aim with a machete isn't that practiced, so I drive a sharp Chinese cleaver knife through it with a rubber or wooden mallet.
3. Scoop the flesh out with a spoon.
4. See "fresh coconut" above for what to do with the water (you do keep a bottle of vodka chilled in the freezer, don't you) - or you can drink it chilled and straight up (the coconut water, not the vodka).

Coconut Milk is made by grinding up the coconut flesh, soaking it in water and squeezing it dry for the liquid. Generally two soakings are used, the first for "thick" coconut milk and the second for "thin" coconut milk. For freshest quality make it yourself but canned is pretty good and a whole lot easier. Buy only unsweetened, the ingredients should not list any kind of sugar. My usual brand is Aroy-D which is a very thick good tasting coconut milk, though I have had others just as good - and some that were a bit thin. See my page Coconut Milk for details on how to make fresh coconut milk.

Coconut Cream floats to the top of coconut milk and can be skimmed off. Just as with cream from cow's milk this is the oil rising to the top. Most cans of coconut milk will have some cream, which usually sticks to the top lid and has to be scraped off. Rich coconut cream is also sold in cans, but buy only unsweetened with no sugar in the ingredients. My usual brand is Savoy, though there are other fine brands as well.

Coconut Water from "fresh young coconuts" as described above is also available in cans. The tall can in the picture is Parrot brand and features some chips of the soft flesh floating in it. The brands I've sampled are Parrot, Goya and Polynesian Treasure, all from Thailand and all sweetened with sugar. Parrot and Polynesian were fine, but Goya was waaaaaay over-sweetened.

Dried Coconut is produced commercially and sold grated or flaked in bags. Several degrees of fineness may be available. Again, buy unsweetened for ethnic recipes - dried coconut sold for use in baking may be heavily sweetened. Kept in a cool dry place dried coconut should keep for months but will eventually discolor..

Dry grated coconut can be substituted in recipes calling for fresh coconut but it needs to be reconstituted by soaking in water for 20 minutes or more before use. For very fine grated use 4 T water to 4 T coconut and you'll end up with about 1/3 cup of reconstituted coconut or 3 oz. For courser grated use 3 T water to 4 T coconut and you'll end up with about 1/3 cup but it'll only weigh 2 oz

In Indian markets you may find "grate it yourself" dried half coconuts. You might not recognize them at first because they're so small. Coconut shrinks a lot as it dries so a dried half coconut may be only 2-1/2 to 3 inches across. The left half in the photo was 3-1/8 inch diameter and weighed 3-1/8 ounces - and was as hard as plastic.

Coconut Oil was formerly used in many American food products, along with the similar palm oil. Together they are known as "tropical oils". These oils were driven out of the market by the American Heart Association's high profile and well financed vilification of saturated fats as artery cloggers. This vilification was not based on valid science, was certainly not supported by demographics and has been discredited by other researchers and by people on the Atkins diet who ate plenty of saturated animal fats (the very worst according to the AHA) and didn't die - but the AHA is still preaching it as gospel.

The AHA urged us to replace tropical oils with partially hydrogenated seed oils (trans fats) now known to be the most deadly of all artery clogging fats. Coconut Oil (92% saturated fat) is the dominant cooking oil in large parts of Southeast Asia from southern India to the Philippines. The people of this region do not show the dire symptoms predicted by the AHA but are instead rather "heart healthy".

Tropical Oils are again appearing in the American food market brought in by food processors desperate to replace those deadly trans fats with something safe. Coconut oil in particular is considered the most healthy of all oils by a growing number of health practitioners.

Some of the pro-coconut partisans are just as shrill as the anti-coconut folks and declare all vegetable oils based on polyunsaturated fats to be dangerous because they quickly go rancid and generate carcinogens. Some are even suspicious of monounsaturated fats like olive oil. More on all this at at link (C1). When money flows from powerful commercial enterprises like the seed oil cartels, and careers and egos of academic researchers are on the line, the truth is difficult to know. You can pay a scientist to prove anything.

Personally, I fall back on the demographic data. Are the people who consume lots of coconut oil suffering as predicted? No? Did Americans have a lot of artery problems back when they practically lived on saturated pig fat? No? Well then, where's the problem?

In India cooks who have ghee and mustard oil do look down on coconut oil as "smelly", but most coconut oil available in the U.S. comes from the Philippines and is completely deodorized. The smelly stuff can only be found in a few Indian specialty markets here - and possibly in health food stores as "all natural".

I have used Philippine coconut oil and have found it a very fine cooking oil, clear and without flavors that would interfere with food taste. Its one weakness is smoke point. It can withstand only 350°F/177°C, which is higher than butter but not as high as ghee (highly clarified butter). It can be stored at room temperatures for a very long time without rancidity.

Ingredient Index - Coconut

• C1 - The Truth About Saturated Fat - Mary Enig, PhD, Sally Fallon.
• C2 - Coconut Research Center - information including nutrition data for coconut products.
• C3 - Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages - Coconut - detailed botanical and other information on coconuts.
• C4 - Coconut-info.com - a commercial site promoting coconut products, particularly coconut oil, with information on the controversy over coconut oil.