Coconut milk and cream

Cooking time: 10 min. / 0 min.Difficulty: easy

Recipes → Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka curry could`t do without coconut milk and cream. Before I went to Asia for the first time, I thought, that coconut milk is a ready juice in coconut. But I was wrong :)

Process

Half a coconut. If you do not know how to open it, watch the video below. If you do not dare to try the pictured way, just hit some hard sharp edge with some power. For instance I do it in front of the house on the concrete edge of the pavement ;). Pour out the juice. If it is completely pure, you can drink it. White coconut meat grate very fine. If you have a special coconut grater, use it, if not, take off the white meat and grate on hand grater or in electrical blender as fine as possible. 

Squeeze and strain it. The first batch is coconut cream. Then mix coconut with a bit of water, process properly and squeeze and strain again. You can put it into the blender again. Repeat once more. The liquid from these two rounds is coconut milk.

To give you an approximate idea how much water to use, for coconut milk the ratio of coconut meat and water is 1:1, for coconut cream it is 4:1 (or no water at all). 

Coconut milk and cream is essential for most kinds of Sri Lanka curries. The curry recipes you will find among others from Sri Lanka. In majority of recipes coconut milk is put to the dish at the beginning of cooking process and coconut cream few minutes before the end.

 

To buy a coconut scraper US, UK, Europe, To buy a blender US, UK, Europe

Video recipe

Video contains subtitles.