Coconuts are one of the most essential ingredients for any type of cooking in coastal India. Curries, chutneys, masalas and even rice, are quite incomplete with coconut or even its milk.
The green coconut or tender coconut that’s popular for its sweet water and tender delicious white meat inside tends to be more expensive than the regular brown coconut used in cooking. The only difference between the two is the age. The green coconut is young and unripened while the brown coconut is mature.
How to check for freshness
The meat of the mature coconut is more commonly used in cooking. It can also be used to make coconut milk at home. Brown coconuts also contain water, which you can drink. They don’t contain as much water as a tender, green coconut but about half a glass of water is easily derived. It’s best if you crack the coconut over a bowl and open it fully, to check for any mould before consuming the water.
Now, the reason a coconut could be mouldy inside is, the shell could have a crack in it that you may not have noticed at the time of purchase. Exposure to the elements from this crack could cause the meat inside to start rotting. It’s best to not use the coconut if you find mould.
Cracking open the coconut
The ways of breaking open a coconut may vary. Households rarely change how they go about it and that can be a hammer, a cleaver or even one of these.
Once you break open the coconut, drain the water over a sieve into a bowl. This will help remove any of the husk that might fall into the water when breaking the coconut. The water will look a bit milky and not as clear as a tender green coconut. It could also taste slightly acidic, if the coconut is old. If it’s too opaque it’s best to throw it away. The meat inside should be white and not discoloured.
To remove the meat, use a strong knife with a slim blade and slide it in close to the shell. Twist it slightly to loosen the meat and continue to slide it along the inner part of the shell. The coconut will come loose and break off in pieces.
If you have the time and can’t force the knife in, put the two halves of the coconut in the freezer for about half an hour. The cold will dehydrate the coconut slightly and removing the meat will become that much easier.
How to store
Now a lot of people don’t go through the hassle of scooping out the meat like this. They use a coconut scraper. This gives you just the white meat of the coconut and not the brown skin that can sometimes be hard if the coconut is older. If coconuts are used along with the skin in food, it could cause a throat irritation if the coconut shavings are sprinkled after the food is cooked, like in a thoran.
If you do not have a coconut scraper, you can use a potato peeler to peel off the coconut skin. It’s just a tad tougher than, say, peeling a vegetable, but it does the job.
Your hands can get a bit oily while peeling the coconut so ensure you keep wiping it on a kitchen towel to ensure your palms don’t slip.
Unless you’re cooking a meal for a lot of people or a particular recipe calls for an entire coconut, you will not be using the entire coconut in one go. In this case, you can either make a coconut-coriander chutney right away, or grate it and store it in the fridge in an airtight container. If you don’t want to do either, put the remaining pieces of the coconut in a freezer-safe container and put it in the freezer. It will stay for weeks.
When you want to use it, remove it from the freezer and place it in a bowl of water for about half an hour to rehydrate. If you hadn’t peeled the brown skin before storing in your freezer, no problem. The water will rehydrate the skin as well and it’ll be soft enough to peel off with a vegetable peeler.
Now sometimes, we buy coconuts and forget about it only remembering we have it when we need it. If you break open a coconut that has been lying in your kitchen for a while, chances are there will be no water in it. If you do break open a coconut and find that it does not have water, don’t throw it away! It won’t be as juicy as a coconut with water, but it is definitely usable. But, in this case, make sure you remove the brown skin, since that tends to be much harder. If you can’t peel it easily, soak it for a bit and peel when the skin has softened.
It’s best to cook this coconut in a curry, instead of using it raw like in a chutney or on a thoran, because it tends to be quite dry. When minced or ground into a paste and cooked, it releases a far nuttier flavour than a regular coconut
Store it as you would a regular coconut in the freezer and rehydrate before use.
*Feature image by Tijana Drndarski on Unsplash
