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Making Coconut Milk because Cows do not graze on the Beach
[00:29.8]
Okay. So, Ben I’ll share a little factoid with you that I doubt you knew before. Today, maybe not. Cows don’t graze on the beach. So what do you do when you live in the tropics? Well, when you live on the Caribbean Sea, like we’re living out here today, and you need some milk for a soup or for a bread or for whatever.
[00:53.5]
For your coffee. That’s why you meant cows don’t graze out here. Yeah. And you need milk. And we need milk. Yeah. So you milk some coconuts is what you do. And to help us today is our good friend Mark is gonna show us how to open a coconut.
[01:11.4]
So we’re doing it from scratch today.
How to peel a Coconut to make coconut milk
[01:16.8]
This is how you peel a coconut.
[01:31.0]
Only in Belize. I’m sure you make this easier than it really is. Only in Belize. And it has to be the brown coconuts. Like, that has to be the brown coconut. And then you get the milk out of it.
[01:50.4]
There you go. Voila. Oh, look at the little egg. Then. I guess you call it a nut, not an egg. And I’ll give you a real factoid this time. Like the first factoid. This is the largest nut in the world. So once we’ve got it.
[02:06.3]
Thank you, Mark. You’re welcome. We’re very fast with this thing. And so once you have it out of the husk, you, want to crack it in half? And I’m kind of turning it around in my hand. Oh, my God, look at that.
[02:23.7]
And most of the water spilled, but there’s some water in there. Oh, it’s good. It’s sweet. Now you go. Greater it. Now, there’s a special device that’s been designed, and just about every Belizean household will have one of these.
The Tool most Belizean homes have for grinding a Coconut
[02:41.5]
And, it’s specially designed to fit inside the coconut. You’ll see it right now. Okay. And you hand crank it to get the kernel out of this very hard shell. So if you come with me, we’ll go over and do that process. Make we go. Thank you, Mark.
[03:04.7]
And we’re making coconut milk. Coconut milk. Thanks, Mark. You’re welcome. Dear.
[03:22.4]
Hi, dear. Hi. So if you want to come over this side. Okay. So you can see it’s a specially designed, coconut grater. And it’s perfectly shaped to fit inside the coconut and you just hand crank it and you get to shred the coconut.
How to get the oil from a Coconut.
[03:41.2]
And shredding the coconut allows it makes it easier for a lot of the oils that are naturally inside the coconut to be extracted. So much easier. Now if we were making coconut oil, we would take this, shredded coconut and we would cook it.
[03:59.8]
We add a little water on there in it in a pot and we would cook it down and that would let the oil separate from, the shredded coconut. But we don’t want to make cooking oil. We want to make coconut milk. Okay, so let’s get this out of the kernel here.
[04:21.0]
Grace Foods has nothing on you. Look at that. Actually growing up, my sister in law always had me do it because she’s like, somehow you do it faster and you’re able to make a finer grate of the coconut. She said. And in that way she says, I can extract more milk, but I just think that’s how she feels.
[04:39.3]
So she didn’t have to do this part of it.
[04:45.8]
But this gadget makes it really fast. If you don’t have one of these at home, you’re using a cleaver knife and you’re literally wedging the kernel out of the hard shell and you’re putting it, in a blender. Got it. And you’re adding a little water in there. Usually when I do it at home, I add hot water or, warm water because again, that allows you to extract more of the oils out of it.
[05:08.6]
But this is golden to have this. This makes it so much easier because I’m not risking my thumb with a cleaver knife trying to extract the coconut out of there. So now that we have our shredded coconut.
[05:25.5]
Look at that, we’ve extracted them, we have our Colander here. And we just want to put this inside there. Normally it would be warm water.
[05:41.2]
I’m not using warm water at this moment. I’m just using regular water. And we want to run that through and then we just kind of want to massage it in there. Get, make sure the water goes through all of that shredded coconut. Just get it all through.
[06:00.3]
And now that it’s in there, now we just squeeze. Oh, look at that. Sure as well. We’re just squeezing it.
[06:12.9]
And the colander keeps all of the trash or all of the kernel, shredded kernel in the colander and we get just the milk product inside there. Now in that milk there is oil, there is coconut oil in there.
It is Natural Coconut Milk used for cooking
[06:29.1]
And it’s raw, natural, unprocessed state. But this coconut milk, in Belize as in other Caribbean countries, we use this milk for adding to, breads, to bake breads.
[06:44.3]
We use it as a basis for a wonderful fish soup called the sere. And you can use it in other soups as well. Whatever you use cow’s milk in, you can substitute with coconut milk. It’s all natural, it’s fresh, and it adds that wonderful coconut flavor.
[07:01.5]
And Belizean breads all the time, when we get visitors here, they love the local breads, and it’s because locals have put coconut milk in it. Is that a no? No. You can try.
[07:20.2]
You want to try some too? Yeah. Taster here with us. It’s really good. Thank you for being brave, Bernadette. It’s good, right? So you can see yourself adding that to coffee if you were lactose intolerant or adding it to rice.
Rice steamed with Coconut Milk has nutritional value
[07:39.2]
We steam rice with coconut milk as well. And using coconut milk to steam rice actually makes, it less, it affects the carbs of the rice so that, it’s better for you. There’s less calories when you use the coconut milk.
[07:55.1]
And of course, there’s more flavor to it. See? Even more reasons. Wow. There you go. It’s easy to make coconut milk. So with this handy dandy thing, what do you call this coconut grinder? A coconut grinder. That makes it very doable, makes it very quick, because I’m with you.
[08:11.6]
And using a knife to do it, I would be in trouble. So we don’t care that cows don’t graze on the beach, cuz we got coconuts. That’s delicious. Thanks, Ben, for another wonderful educational series with you. Hey, my pleasure.
[08:27.6]
Yeah, it’s awesome, isn’t it? And then we get to have coconut milk and enjoy this beautiful view. Yeah. Not a bad day in Hopkins. Not a bad. Not a bad day at all.
Explore more Belize Recipes here: Belize Recipes
