Well, mostly, anyway.

Being a Canadian, I didn’t know that coconut scrapers were called coconut scrapers – I would have called them shredders or something else, but coconut scraper it is, at least in this part of the world. After all, how many coconuts did I ever buy when I lived in Canada? Less than half a dozen? Yeah, that’s not experienced.

As it turns out, there are several types of coconut scrapers, and what kind you go with depends on your needs.

Hand-held type

These coconut scrapers that are somewhat similar to lime zesters. They scrape small amounts of coconut at a time, so take much longer to scrape a coconut. If you’re looking for a small amount of long shreds or wide shreds, then this would do the job, but if you’re looking at scraping an entire coconut, then, well, let’s just say my hands are already throbbing…

The images are from Gourmet Sleuth. There’s also an image there to a bench coconut scraper that they refer to as a Thai wood coconut grater. It isn’t. I mean it isn’t just a Thai design. That design exists in Sri Lanka, and, no doubt, India, Bangladesh, and other countries in the region.

Counter-top models

C-clamp coconut scraper

We use a coconut scraper with a c-clamp that attaches to the counter, either temporarily or permanently. The clamp becomes loosened while I use it, but that’s to be expected since I also use some heavy cloth to protect the counter – don’t want to scratch the counter surface, after all.

Other people clamp theirs on and never remove it. If it’s attached tightly enough, it NEVER loosens. We have nowhere to permanently mount, so we remove and re-attach at will.

With this c-clamp scraper, I can scrape a whole coconut in about a minute. When my joints aren’t bothering me. When they are, it might take me a minute and a half. This coconut scraper is highly effective at getting the job done quickly. And, as long as you hold the coconut around the shell with your fingers not close to the shell edge, you won’t even injure myself.

Clumsy me has managed to not injure myself yet, knock on wood.

This Australian site has a counter-top c-clamp style coconut grater for sale at AUS $49.01. The one I use costs around Rs. 900 (about US $9) at Arpico.

Suction/vacuum based coconut scraper

My mother in law used to have a coconut scraper with a suction base, but the suction was so horrible that it took one person to hold the scraper in place while the other person scraped the coconut. Hardly practical or useful, and really, just an all-round failure in engineering. NOT the kind I would ever recommend.

The very next time we went shopping, we bought the kind with the c-clamp.

The image for the suction mounted is from Spices of India.

Bench scrapers

My mother in law uses a bench coconut scraper. She straddles the bench with the scraper out front and scrapes the coconut against the blade. She’s pretty quick at it and can have a coconut scraped in the same time it takes me to scrape a coconut with the c-clamp kind.

I can’t use it because, quite frankly, I wouldn’t be able to stand again. Pesky bad knees. And back.

The first image is from Temple of Thai while the second image was take at my favourite mortar & pestle and cast iron griddle shop.

Motorized

These kinds are really more for high-volume coconut scraping. I saw one at Arpico once, priced at around Rs. 7500 (about $75 US). Saw another one at my favourite mortar & pestle and cast iron griddle shop for around the same price. Yehaw!

You might also be interested in reading a post over at Mental Masala about attaching the round scraper ball to a power drill. There’s also a picture of the suction-mounted coconut scraper that I so hate and find so completely useless.

So.

Clear as mud? Questions? Does that tell you everything you ever wanted to know about coconut scrapers?

I’ve mentioned before that not everyone here owns a proper stove with oven. It’s quite common for people to use propane burners like these. Although not everyone can afford this much.

We have one neighbor, an old woman, who lives down our road and comes to the abandoned lot next to our house every now and then to pick out pieces of wood for her to use as a source of fuel for cooking.

This big truck is transporting gas cylinders for Shell.

The gas cylinders are used for cooking either with gas stoves like I have (4 gas burners plus an oven with a broiler) or with what those from the US and Canada would think of as camping stoves with one to three burners, although they don’t come with the wind shields like the camping stoves do.

Most people can’t afford stoves with ovens, so either use the camping stoves with the gas tanks or use other forms of fuel for cooking, like kerosene cookers, wood, coconut husks, and so on. And, even when they have a stove with an oven, the oven is seldom, if ever, used.

Personally, I use our oven frequently. I have a feeling, though, that Fahim’s mother has never used hers.

Tags: cooking, baking, gas, propane, stove, oven, burner, Sri Lanka

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about baking on the stove. You can see some previous posts:

• Baking on the Stove: Experiment 1
• Baking on the Stove: Experiment 2
• Roasting vegetables on the stove

Fahim and I have wild yeast (sourdough that’s not sour) sweet buns most mornings for breakfast, and as I’ve mentioned before, Fahim prefers them fresh-baked every day. And, hey, I try to keep him happy.

I started the baking-on-the-stove thing back in March of this year, so I’ve baked the sweet buns on the stove probably around 150 out of the last 200 or so days. That’s a lot of stove-top baking!

It’s worked out very well for us. Very very well.

In the first picture, you see the buns still in the baking dish I use. Okay, so I could have baked the buns longer so they were browner, but I was hungry, which means impatient.

In the next image, you see the setup I use. The baking dish goes on a trivet (came with rubber thingies on the legs, but I removed those) which rests on two aluminum lids. I originally used a cast-iron pan, but the high temperatures burned the seasoning off, so I put a kibosh on that. The aluminum lids don’t present any problems like that – they work great! I use two since they’re fairly thin and it gives me more even temperature inside the oven.

In the next image, you can see the rice pot I put on top of the aluminum lids so the baking dish is fully enclosed. The rice pot can’t be used as a rice pot any longer because it has a small hole in it, but for these purposes, it’s perfect!

And in the final image, you see the finished buns. Yum! Fresh buns every day – they’re great!

Tags: baking on the stove, stovetop baking, experiments

You know the cast iron pan I got? Yeah, I still love it. As cast iron pans go, they need to be seasoned.

Seasoning involves rubbing it with some kind of oil or fat. Some people recommend lard as being the best. Then you stick it in the oven, which you then turn up to 177C / 350F for an hour or so, then turn the oven off and let the cast iron piece(s) cool down. Then cook with it like normal.

Also, don’t use soap to clean it and don’t use steel wool or any other abrasives to scrub off the built-on layer of grease unless you’re trying to remove that layer so you can reseason.

But there’s another way to season cast iron. Apply oil to the outside surface and cook greasy foods in it until the seasoning builds up.

Well, and then there’s the third way. My way. Which may or may not be a good thing.

After applying oil, I cooked some pancakes in it. I suppose I should tell you that I used virgin coconut oil. Virgin coconut oil is that coconut oil which is solid at temperatures below around 24-25C. Which means it’s never solid here.

Virgin coconut oil has a smoke point of about 180C / 360F and, I believe, a flash point of around 225C  / 437F. I say "I believe" because it’s been difficult finding corroborating sources to confirm this information. But for now, anyway, we’ll go with these numbers, shall we?

And while the pancakes were cooking, the pan around the pancakes ignites. Blue flame. As in, real flames and not a hallucination. Granted, the coconut oil had been smoking, and I had turned the flame down, but cast iron retains heat very well, and I had not, evidently, turned it down enough since it was still heating up. Ah, yes, technicalities, technicalities.

So what do I do? Well, kiddies, a day later, I decide to finish the curing job – there are only some blank patches left – on the stove top instead of using the oven, which uses so much more gas. And what do I get?

More flamage.

Tags: stoopid human tricks, don’t try this yourself, cast iron, cookware, seasoning cast iron

On our way to Arpico in Battaramulla for our weekly grocery shopping, we stopped off at a shop. This shop is about 100 feet east of Arpico on the opposite side of the road in the even that anyone’s looking for it.

We stopped because, the last time we were there, I saw that they had stone mortar and pestles, something which I had been trying to find, to no avail, for a couple or four years.

Odels has the smooth marble ones, but five years ago, they were priced at around Rs.2500 (~$25US), which I thought was severely overpriced. Wooden ones are easy enough to find here, but whatever’s being crushed leaves a smell and taste behind. Wooden mortar and pestles that are used to crush both garlic cloves and nutmeg? Yeah, no.

I wanted stone of some kind. Easier to keep clean and free from odors and tastes and residue.

In this picture, starting from the bottom right corner, there’s an orange plastic rectangular basin. To its immediate left, there are aluminum baking trays. To their left is a cast iron griddle in front of aluminum griddles. These griddles are used here to cook rotis and the like. I’d been wanting one (along with a cast iron Dutch oven, pots, and pans…) for a long time but haven’t seen them here before, and asking around just got me strange looks.

I was leaning out of the trishaw – Fahim had gone in to buy the mortar & pestle – and looked at the griddle. Looked again and thought, hey, that looks like cast iron. Cast iron???? So I jumped out of the trishaw and picked it up – heavy like cast iron and the right look and texture. I go into the shop and ask Fahim to ask what this is made of. Sure enough, the guy responds with cast iron. In Sinhala, of course.

Anyway. To their immediate left are a couple of mortar and pestles, but these are wooden on the outside and lined on the inside with aluminum. I don’t want aluminum.

Above and behind the wood/aluminum mortar & pestles & griddles are flat rectanguar slabs of rock that are smaller on the bottom than on the top. Those are grinding stones. Fahim’s mom uses them for grinding up coconut and spices for sambols. We have one cemented into a platform at the back of the house, but I can’t use it because of my back.

Above those slabs is one aluminum/wood mortar & pestle and one stone pestle. The pestle I walked away with.

To the left of the slabs of stone is a bench coconut scraper. I’ve got a better picture coming up. To the right of the stone slabs is an even larger pestle. I thought it would be overkill for me and my small kitchen.

In this picture we have the other side of the entrance with various aluminum pots & bowls, coconut spoons, and so on. Ooooh, exciting. I know.

Here we have an electric coconut scraper in the first image. I saw one similar to this at Arpico a month or so back for over Rs.7,000 (~$70US). Overkill for us for sure.

In the second image is a bench coconut scraper. Not a great shot. I’ll have to get a better picture. It’s a bench about four inches off the ground, long enough to sit on it straddled. The coconut scraper part is wrapped in the plastic at the top, or front end.

Then check out the third picture, which is another coconut scraper, but this one is attached to a C-clamp, so it can be fastened to a counter- or table-top temporarily. This is the coconut scraper I use, and with it, I can scrape a whole coconut in about a minute, perhaps a shade less.

And here are the requisite close-ups of the mortar & pestle (~Rs.900 or ~$9US) and cast iron griddle (~Rs.300 or ~$3US) I got. The mortar & pestle is still rough and will take time and use to smooth down. It’s what’s available, so I go with it. The griddle is about 10" in diameter, the biggest they had. I’ve started the seasoning process on it already…

Tags: cast iron, cast iron pans, coconut scrapers, coconut spoons, mortar & pestle, pots, pans