Whacking A Coconut, The Easy Way

When I was a kid, I was told that the easiest way to crack open a coconut was to put it in the oven and bake it for 20 minutes, then poke through one of the eyes on the end of the coconut, drain the coconut milk out, then pry it open.

Well, no. So no no no.

That liquid in the middle of the coconut is not milk. It’s coconut water. Coconut milk is done by extracting the liquid out of the nut meat, and that’ll be a lesson for another day.

And that method from above? I could seriously injure myself doing that. No, really. Okay, so it doesn’t help that I’m incredibly clumsy, but that isn’t a great way of doing things.

I now crack open coconuts the way my husband and mother in law taught me. I even use my mother in law’s Weapon Of War for whacking purposes.

1. Put the coconut in your non-dominant hand (that would be my left) with the eyes either facing your fingertips or your wrist.
2. Take a heavy knife and, with the blunt end, wack the coconut around its equator (if you think about the coconut as the earth and the eyes of the coconut as one of its poles). My mother in law can open a coconut with about three wacks of a knife. I now take six. In the beginning, I’d take *cough* a couple of dozen.
3. When it starts to sound hollow, you’ve broken through to the inside. The water will come out. Either discard or save for drinking or other uses as you please. Pry the coconut open as necessary.
4. You should now have two more-or-less halves of a coconut. Yay!

It takes much longer to type this up than the actual execution, by the way.

Then you can do whatever your little heart desires with the coconut meat. Me, I shred.

Tags: coconuts, Sri Lanka