Adventures in Coconut Land

coconut purée

My daughter went nuts at the DeKalb Farmers' Market today, insisting we buy a coconut. At a dollar a coconut I was in no mood to argue. One learns to pick one's battles in the eternal death struggle that is parenting. So we came home with a coconut.

I cracked it open, drained it, and we cut out the flesh. I was sure a seven year old child who had never had fresh coconut would find it disconcerting, or perhaps just "not what she was expecting," but instead she quite liked it. She insisted we buy more, and immediately wanted to make a drink from it.

Which immediately fired my interest. If there is anything that fresh ingredients demand, it is a proper glass to be put in with the proper libation. For coconut, the most obvious place to start would be a piña colada. But the proper recipe calls for coconut cream. How to make that?

coconut boil

None of my cookbooks were helpful. Turns out the Italians, French, Julia Child, and those Brooklyn hipsters do not work with fresh coconuts too often. I turned to mr. google, who turned up a mass of dispiritingly dissimilar information. According to several recipes, one needed to puree the flesh and bring to a boil with 1 1/2 cups water, let sit for thirty minutes, strain, then chill. This makes coconut milk, but chilling will separate the cream. Well, okay. But Alton Brown wants you to grate and then cook it up with a certain amount of 2% milk to make either cream or milk (less for the cream, obviously).

coconut sieve

I opted for the former recipe. With some slight modifications.

I cut the flesh up and put it in the blender with a little water. Once it was ... grated, or whatever one might call its state after being pulverized, I combined it with one cup of water and heated it to boiling over the stove. It took almost no time at all. I let it sit for half an hour, and then strained it. This yielded 1 1/4 cups of coconut milk, or cream, or whatever the substance was. I chilled it, and an hour or so later, we made piña coloda. The recipe for that was pretty standard:

2 oz. coconut cream
3 oz. pineapple juice
2 oz. rum
1 tsp confectioner's sugar
a heap of ice.

And blend.

coconut borracho

And enjoy.