Jean Galton Kate Baldwin Christy Nordstrom

Related Articles

• Olympic Anticipation
• You Say Szechuan, I Say Sichuan
• From the Garden
• Uncorked in the Kitchen
• Try This At Home

Lamb Chops with Coconut-Creamed Spinach. See recipe Coconut, Pear and Hazelnut Bread Pudding. See recipe

I have a relationship with coconut. I wouldn’t call it an affair, since it’s very one-sided. (After all, I’m human and coconut is not.) Besides, it’s really just educational on my part. I’ve spent several hours here, a week or two there, learning to appreciate the diverse gifts of the coconut.

It began 20 years ago when I worked on an advertising shoot for Baker’s Coconut. My task as the assistant food stylist was simply to sort coconut. It was sweetened, dried coconut, the kind in the familiar blue packages found on supermarket shelves. I spent an entire day—eight hours straight—sorting out the longest, fattest and most perfect strands and setting them aside, carefully wrapped, to use in the photos. After that, I couldn’t look at coconut for several weeks.

My next encounter was in a magazine test kitchen. We were working on a recipe for a three-layer coconut cake—that tall, rich and delicious Southern standard that requires fresh coconut to make it incredibly luscious. Our kitchen assistant was from the Caribbean and knew how to handle a fresh coconut. She’d bake it in a hot oven and then crack the coconut open with a few well-placed taps from a hammer and pick. All the cooks in the kitchen would help shave off piles of moist, delicate coconut strips with vegetable peelers. Some of the coconut we’d mix into a sweetened sour-cream filling. The rest would be used to blanket the cake in clouds of pure white coconut shards.

After that, I was introduced to coconut cream and coconut milk, and a whole new world opened. Taking a few classes in Thai cuisine, I learned about the shimmering liquid obtained from grated and simmered coconut meat and especially the thick cream that rises to the top of the milk (a pleasant surprise when you open a can of coconut milk). We used the cream in delicious green and red curries, and I learned to thicken the cream until pools of coconut oil started to separate out.

Several years later, my relationship with coconut took a new turn when I discovered coconut oil. I learned that it’s a saturated fat, but an amazingly healthy one, free of trans fats and lower in calories than most fats. It’s rich in lauric acid, an antimicrobial found in breast milk and—you guessed it—coconut oil. And I discovered that coconut oil is wonderful for cooking, with a remarkable flavor and mouth-feel. Incredibly, coconut oil turns out to be extremely stable (unusual in an oil but always a boon to a relationship) and keeps easily at room temperature for several years without going rancid. I began to use it for grilling, baking and sautéing—and the fried chicken I made with it was positively astounding.

When Is a Nut Really a Drupe?
Officially, coconuts are classified as drupes, not nuts. That is, it is a fleshy fruit with a thin skin and a central stone containing a seed—think plums or olives. It’s difficult to imagine if you’ve never seen a coconut growing in a coconut palm, but there’s a fleshy outer shell (green when unripe, ivory or gray when ripe) covering a brown, hairy husk. The husk cloaks a thin, brown, woody shell, which is the nut. It is inside the brown shell, with its triangle of three indented “eyes” (frequently used to crack open the coconut), where the treasure of white coconut meat, or copra, lies. And if you’re lucky enough to get a really fresh coconut, you’ll have the bonus of sweet coconut water sloshing about inside.

So there you have it: my ever-growing relationship with coconut. It’s still evolving, as every day I learn something new about coconut oil, coconut milk or copra. And I haven’t even begun to explore many other coconut products, such as coconut palm sugar or virgin coconut oil. But I’m slowly learning how coconut’s buttery taste and delicate texture add a dramatic flavor to oh-so-many different dishes. So this relationship has plenty of room to expand and grow. And with all of the fabulous coconut dishes I’m going to be cooking, it’s sure to enhance my other relationships as well.

Nut Results Doing a little research, I discovered a wide variety of products made or extracted from the amazing coconut. Here are a few of them: COPRA coconut meat, usually sold dried, in both unsweetened and sweetened versions COCONUT MILK the liquid squeezed from grated coconut meat after it’s been simmered with water. In the tropics, it’s made fresh; here in Seattle, canned is the easiest alternative COCONUT CREAM the thick cream extracted from coconut milk. In a can of coconut milk, it usually rises to the top. CREAM OF COCONUT a sweetened coconut liquid used in cocktails and mixed drinks COCONUT JUICE the clear, mildly sweet liquid found in the center of a fresh coconut COCONUT OIL pressed from dried copra or separated out of coconut milk and cream when heated. Coconut oil is used in cooking and cosmetics and is being developed as a bio-diesel fuel as well VIRGIN COCONUT OIL pressed from fresh, not dried, coconut meat. It has the pure scent of fresh coconut and is used for cooking and cosmetics WATER COCONUT the white, jellylike flesh of an immature coconut COCONUT PALM SUGAR a brown sugar made from boiling down the sap of coconut palms COCONUT PALM VINEGAR a mild vinegar produced from coconut palm sap, used in Filipino dishes COCONUT WINE made from fermented coconut palm sap COCONUT LEAVES used as food wrappers (similar to banana leaves) for steaming many different types of dishes

Please visit our recipe file for great coconut recipes, including Lamb Chops with Coconut-Creamed Spinach, Coconut Ginger Shortbread Dipped in Chocolate, and Coconut, Pear and Hazelnut Bread Pudding.