Coconut Milk

Does your recipe requires coconut milk and you are out of stock? Do you have full cream milk in your pantry? Just add some full cream milk to your recipe, you will be amazed at the similarity in flavour as if you used the coconut milk!

When the coconut reaches the mature stage, the outside is brown in colour, dry and wrinkle looking. To get to the inside of the fruit, the nut has to be busted open with a cutlass (matchette), the husk removed and the hard insides would then be accessable. This inside nut has to be busted open to get the jelly which has now gotten hard at the matured stage of the coconut.

Generally this nut can be purchased at your local market or grocery store. Personally it is very difficult for me to bust it open so I will ask my husband or son or if they are not around at the time, I would throw the nut on the ground and it would bust open.

The next step would be extract the jelly that is now very hard from the brown outside shell. You would have to do this with a knife. After all the hard white insides of the nut has been extracted, cut them into small pieces and place them in a blender with a bit of water. Blend until finely grated.

Get a bowl and place a strainer over the bowl. Pour the liquid, which is your coconut milk, out the blender. Use your fingers to press the grated husk firmly against the bottom of the strainer. This is to extract all the liquid. Pour some more water over the grated coconut until you think you have extracted basically all the liquid.

You can either go the easy way of purchasing a can of coconut milk and just pour the contents (or portion) into your pot or you can make your own using the raw material.