Where To Buy Fresh Coconuts

[2006] 

[Attendee] 

You just return them; they'll take them back. I return everything. I don't keep anything.  

[Aajonus] 

If I get a bad coconut, it goes back to the store. Absolutely. 

[Attendee] 

Better do what she does. She throws them up in the air and smashes them on the ground.  

[Attendee #2] 

What I do is I put em in an old towel and take a hammer and then I take a wide screwdriver, get in there and just pop it the meat. 

[Attendee #3] 

I found a good way to do it quickly. I've got a wooden board, a really hard board and a serrated knife and I slice it thinly.  

[Aajonus] 

I found out an even better way. You take the oyster knife like I say, and pull out the coconut, then you just chop it into large chunks and you put it in a food processor like a Cuisinart, and you grate it, put it into gratings. 

But before you do that, once you take your pieces, your chunks, you put 'em in a jar, like a quart jar or larger, half gallon or gallon jars. You fill your sink with hot water, you put it in there, you put a little water in there, and you get the pieces of meat wet, and then you let us sit.  

You've got no level of water in the jar, you've just got your wet coconut in an empty jar, floating in this warm, it heats the coconut. You get almost 1/3 more coconut cream. I had three little coconuts this big and I got (4x) 8z jars of the coconut cream by doing that. 

Four eight-ounce jars from three little bitty coconuts. 

[Attendee] 

Explain that again one more time.  

[Aajonus] 

Okay. You take the coconut; I don't drink the water in it anymore cause it causes bloating. I was wondering why all these Asians don't drink this coconut water. They just break it and throw it away and I was having four of those a day and after a month I started getting ankle and feet swelling and leg swelling. 

And that's why they don't, cause it causes swelling.  

[Attendee] 

You used to tell me to drink the coconut water.  

[Aajonus] 

Yeah. But you were just drinking one a day, there wasn't much. But it takes a lot more time to drain the water out. Takes a lot of time in the process of making coconut cream. So, what I do is now I just skip that and I just go out there and I take it on a big rock out in my backyard, slam it on there and break it under pieces, then take my curved end oyster knife, pries it very quickly out of the coconut shell. Then I slice it into chunks, no chunks bigger than that, that square, of course, it's that thick.  

Then I put those into a gallon jar. If I'm doing just a few of them, I'll put it in a quart jar. But if I'm doing a lot of them and I want to make it for weeks at a time, like 5 -6 weeks, I may be doing 10 coconuts. So I'll put two gallon jars of this coconut meat. I let it sit in the sink full of hot water. Not hot enough to burn my hand, but hot enough and it takes about 15 minutes to heat that coconut. And I'll go do something else during that time. 

[Attendee] 

What is the temperature of the water?  

[Aajonus] 

Probably 105° - 106°, somewhere around there. And then I come back and everything's warm inside, the heat has caused all of that oil and the meat to become warm and soft. I get it a little wet before I put it in the jar, I forgot to say that. I wet it with my gerolsteiner cause I don't buy any other water. 

[Attendee] 

You could wet it with the coconut water? 

[Aajonus] 

Yeah, you could wet it with the coconut water, absolutely.  

[Attendee] 

Tablespoon per coconut? 

[Aajonus] 

Tablespoon of what?  

[Attendee] 

Water.  

[Aajonus] 

Well, I just, I have a bowl there and I just dip it all in there and put it in the jar. 

Listen to me. I have water in a bowl and I take the pieces and I dip them in the water and put 'em into the jar, then I immerse it.  

[Attendee #2] 

Warm water. 

[Aajonus] 

So, then after the coconut is warm, I put it in the food processor, my Cuisinart, and it gets grated, so it's grated coconut. Then I juice that and it gets so much more juice, there's no chance of cracking the juicer at all, and there's no strain on it. It moves through faster. 

And I get 1/3 more coconut cream.