We love coconut milk at our house. If you’ve never tried it, you must! It is light and refreshing and even the unsweetened variety is slightly sweet. It has been particularly helpful to me in my attempt to give up sugar in my morning joe. I just add a heavy pour of homemade coconut milk to my mug and it’s perfect! My kids love it in their breakfast cereal and I use it in smoothies quite often.
Up until recently, I’ve always bought all of our milks. Then I saw someone mention online that you can make your own and I thought that sounded like a genius idea. Not only is it amazingly easy, but it is also a great money saver.
I’ve made coconut milk with both fresh and dried coconut. The milk made from dried coconut tastes almost exactly like store-bought to me. The milk made with fresh coconut is richer and creamier, but obviously more labor intensive.
I encourage you to try both methods. They are both really, really good! Not only are both version less expensive than store-bought, they are also free of all the stabilizers and additives found in store-bought. Use organic coconut if at all possible.
Leave a comment after you try this one- I’m eager to hear what you think!
Homemade Coconut Milk (Made with Fresh Coconut)
1 fresh coconut
filtered water
pure vanilla extract (optional)
pure maple syrup or honey (optional)
First find the “eyes” in the coconut. If you look closely, you’ll find an area that looks like there are three seams meeting with three softish dents. These are the “eyes” of the coconut and a softer than the rest of the coconut.
Using a nail, a metal skewer, or a screwdriver, hammer a hole into one of the “eyes”. Do this over your blender. Then, use the hole you’ve made to drain the coconut water from the coconut into your blender.
Next, your goal is to remove the white flesh from the inside of the coconut from the hard, brown outside. There are lots of methods for this step floating around the internet, but most of them involve baking the coconut, which you don’t want to do here. So, what I do is use brute force. Ha! I simply beat the heck out of the coconut with the hammer until I have about 6 pieces. Then, I use a small knife to carefully pry the white flesh from the hard brown shell.
Then, put the white coconut flesh in the blender with enough warm water to make it “go”. Blend until it becomes smooth and frothy. Either do a few pulses to get it started, then let it run or use the “blend ice” button, then let it run. It will need to blend for probably about 4 minutes to get to the smooth and frothy point. You want it to look like icy snow, like this:
After you’ve blended it to oblivion, you’ll want to strain it. I got this handy dandy nut milk bag on Amazon. It is a very fine mesh, so it is easy to keep all the pulp inside the bag and strain the milk out. I pour the contents of the blender into the nut milk bag, then give it a good squeeze. You could also use cheesecloth or even a very thin (very clean) towel.
At this point, the coconut milk just needs to be chilled. It is yummy as-is. However, I like to flavor mine a little and make it ever-so-slightly-sweeter. I add a splash of both pure vanilla extract and pure maple syrup.
Coconut milk will separate a bit, so I store mine in a mason jar, so I can give it a quick shake before serving. It will last about 5 days in the fridge. I love these labels, because they dissolve easily when I wash the jars leaving no sticky residue!
Does dealing with a fresh coconut sound like too much work? Use dried coconut instead.
Homemade Coconut Milk (Made with Dried Coconut)
1 part dried, unsweetened coconut- chips or shredded
2 parts filtered water
pure vanilla extract (optional)
pure maple syrup or honey (optional)
Simply place the coconut and water in the blender, then follow the directions for coconut milk made with fresh coconut (above).
Wait!! Don’t throw away all that coconut pulp!! If you like to bake with coconut flour, make your own! If you don’t bake with coconut flour, I challenge you to try it.
Using the leftover pulp also stretches your dollar even further. And who doesn’t like a good deal?!
Homemade Coconut Flour
Spread the coconut pulp out onto a jelly roll pan (baking sheet with an edge) and bake at 200 degrees until completely dry. Once it’s dry, run it through a food processor for a finer texture. Store in an airtight container in your freezer.
For the ‘parts’ of shredded coconut go water. Are you doing volume as in a chip of shreds to two cups water?