"Young Coconut"

[BreezyCooking]

Figured this forum might get me the most responses as to what this is & how to use it.

Our local WalMart (yes, yes I know - WalMart is "evil", let's not go there - lol) carries a really really wide selection of different fruits, veggies, vegetarian products, fresh Asian products, etc., etc. Anyway, I was there this morning & they had a small display of what they called "Young Coconuts". They were large, pure white, (obviously peeled), tightly wrapped in plastic, & the tag said they were most frequently used to make coconut milk.

Is anyone familiar with this & how I would use it? I know how to make "coconut milk", but was wondering if there are other uses for this besides that, that differ from the normally seen mature coconuts.

[Chopstix]

First it may help to clarify terms. Coconut juice is the water that comes out of the coconut when you crack it open. Normally the water from young coconut is fresh-tasting and sweetish, and therefore nice to drink. The meat is soft and translucent and can be scooped out and eaten along with the juice, or just mixed in with the juice to make it creamier.

The more mature a coconut is, the less sweet the juice, and the thicker, harder, and whiter the meat is.

The juice of very mature coconut is not drinkable (at least from what I know. Everyone I know discards it.) The hard meat is finely grated, moistened with boiling water and wrung until a milky liquid comes out. This is what is called coconut milk which is used for cooking. It is opaque white and very creamy.

Hope this helps!

[Anau]

I really love young coconuts, when they're fresh. Sometimes you buy one and open it up and it smells rotten.

Anyway, they actually are not used to make coconut milk, that's done with mature coconuts. The way I eat young coconut is by cutting the top ]off and draining the water then scooping out the flesh into a bowl with some sugar, milk, and a little bit of the coconut water. The flesh at this point is not hard and fibrous but translucent and gelly-like. It's so good, but if they harvest them too early, you don't get much meat for you money.

[larry_stewart]

Young coconuts and their coconut water are very typically found in Brazil. You can even find venders selling the coconuts on the corners in the city streets, just as venders are found in New York city selling giant soft pretzels. The young coconuts are opened by the vender, and you use a straw to drink out all the water. As mentioned earlier in the thread, the coconut 'meat' is much softer in a young coconut, and can be scooped out with a spoon.

larry