How I use coconuts in Puerto Rico

Video transcript:

Several months ago I did a video on how to remove the husk from a brown coconut, an easy way to do that. Please check that out if you haven’t. Today, I want to do a follow-up on, what do you do with all these coconuts once you get the husk off. So I’m going to go into that today.

First of all, when I find a brown coconut, first thing I do is shake them. If I hear the sound of the water inside them, that they still have the coconut water inside, I’ll keep them. Otherwise, I won’t take them. And then what I do is I take them home (and) put them in the garage, because I’m usually not ready to open them at that point. And then, when I’m at a point where I want some coconuts, I go down to my garage and grab several of them (to) open them up. Some of the coconuts still have liquid at that point. Some of them no longer have the liquid because it’s been absorbed. I want to show you how I handle those two types of coconuts today on this video.

So first of all, here’s one that still has the juice inside, the water inside, and this really cool (coconut opening) tool, you can get on Amazon, that will allow you to get the juice out. So real straightforward, one side of the coconut is going to have the three holes. Find the biggest hole and push this into it. Twist, nice and easy. Pull that out.

You can do multiple holes, but what I personally prefer to do is just do one hole, But you’re going to have to be a little slow on how you pour it because it’ll not have airflow. Sometimes the other holes are a little small and hard to open a second hole. Also, if you open up (another) hole sometimes you’ll end up getting some black pieces inside the juice, so i try to go with one hole. Sometimes you… really just have to open multiple holes. With one hole, it just takes a little longer to get the juice out. So I’ll just, I’ll let that sit here in this cup and do its thing.

Now, this is a coconut that had juice in it but no longer does. I’ll show you what I do with these. Oh, before I switch, sometimes you’ll find a coconut that has juice in it. Here’s one. And the holes are very small. This tool works really well with the big holes, but if you have a small hole, you may find that it won’t go in very well. Like this is actually probably an example, it won’t go in very easily because the holes are too small. But what I will do in that situation, it’s not the best solution and there might be better solutions out there, but I’ll actually drive a screwdriver into it and wasn’t planning on demoing this, but yeah. Oh no, I messed up. So I try not to go all the way in (like) I did, but basically what you’ll do is, you get some vice grips (and) pull this out, and then you can use the juice. I won’t do that on camera, but that’s an approach if you have a coconut that the holes are too small for this tool to work.

Okay, back to the dry coconut. This one, I shake it, I can actually hear something rattling in here and that’s when they’re perfect. So this is pretty standard, you know, I got this kind of dull knive pretty cheap, this is (a) Sam’s knife. Just hit all the way around the middle. Keep twisting and turning it as you do it. There we go. This is what I was looking for. When they rattle, you shake them and they’re rattling, this is what you’ll find inside. It looks like a potato.

So, I got a potato peeler. I’m going to make a mess, that’s okay, but I just use a potato peeler. I’ll clean this up later. Take off this stuff. This stuff is completely edible. The skin really doesn’t taste that bad, but it adds a little tiny bit of bitterness, so might as well take it off because it’s really easy to do. I mean how long is that? Like 60 seconds? Really fast and look what you have. Looks like a peeled potato and it’s got all that liquid that was inside is in here so you can see this is nice and juicy, oily, flavorful.

I’m going to cut it, so you can see what it looks like. See inside? It’s gorgeous. What we’ve really gotten into lately (is) you slice these up and dip it in like a Nutella or if you’re watching your sugar intake, keto factory has a sugar-free nutella basically. Delicious. I actually want to experiment with dipping it in dark chocolate but this stuff is amazing and there’s plenty of if you live here in Puerto Rico.

So that’s all I have. I hope it’s been helpful, good luck!