For the Love of Food

I have hit a few “snags” in my sugar-free journey in the past year, but nothing seemed more difficult to overcome than the lack of baker’s coconut in my cooking life. There are/were just so many recipes that I had to leave out. I couldn’t make my grandma’s fruit salad for Thanksgiving, no boiled chocolate oatmeal cookies, no coconut topping for cupcakes, etc.

Then, for my mom’s birthday I wanted to make German Chocolate cake, but you can’t make the frosting without baker’s coconut. So, my mom had the idea that we could just make some and the idea she had seemed pretty simple and easy – especially since she has a food processor with all these great attachments.

So, the coconut was shred in minutes, and a little over an hour later, I was looking at the tastiest baker’s coconut I had ever eaten. Yo will never want to eat the store bought stuff again.

The only “difficult” part is getting the coconut out of it’s shell. But, since my mom is really strong and she has lots of practice (she grew up in a tropical country), it went really quickly.

(the pictures here are of the coconut before cooking. The baker’s coconut will get a light beige caramelized color)

Ingredients:
1 Coconut with lots of coconut water inside
1 1/3 Cup Fructose (or sugar)
1 1/4 Cup Coconut Water (from the above-mentioned coconut)

Directions:
Choose a nice dark brown hard coconut that, when shaken, sounds like there is a lot of water inside.

1. First drain the coconut water to a cup. To do this, poke a large hole into one of the 3 “eyes” of the coconut. Make sure the hole is wide so that enough air can enter to pull out the water. Strain the water to remove any loose particles and set aside.

2. To crack open the coconut you can either throw it on the concrete floor (with this you risk hurting someone and losing pieces of coconut), or you can hammer it open with a regular hammer. Make sure that the coconut is placed on a very firm surface that you cannot damage like a sidewalk, the garage, or the entrance to your home. If you have never done this before, you may want to wear protective eye coverings to shield yourself from any flying particles of coconut shell.

3. Once the coconut is open, collect all the pieces and bring to your working surface. To remove the coconut flesh from the hard shell, use an old knife without a pointed edge (like a dinner knife) and pry the fresh apart from the shell. This can be done best by wedging as much of the knife between a loose part of the coconut and shell as possible and applying pressure to separate them.

4. Once all coconut has been freed from it’s shell, peel off the brown skin with a potato peeler. You can eat this or discard – your choice – I eat it.

5. If you are using a food processor:
Break up the coconut into small enough pieces that you can fit them in your processor. Fit the processor with the shredding attachment and shred all the coconut.

5. If you using a manual mandolin or shredder:
Leave the coconut pieces as large as possible so they are easy to hold. Shred all the coconut.

My coconut gave me 4 cups of shredded coconut and 1 1/4 cup coconut water. Use what ever your coconut gives you. Just remember that the fructose amount should be 1/3 that of the coconut amount. So, if you end up with only 3 cups of shredded coconut, you will only need 1 cup of fructose.

6. To make the baker’s coconut:
In a medium-sized saucepan, place the coconut, coconut water, and fructose. Cook over medium heat until the fluids begin to boil, about 15 minutes. Turn the heat to low immediately and continue to cook, uncovered for 1 hour or until the fluids have reduced to syrup.

Remove from heat and place the coconut in a sieve to stain. Catch the syrup and use on desserts – it has a delicious flan coconut-caramel flavor.

Spread the coconut flakes out on a cookie sheet and let dry over night. Refrigerate or freeze if you will not be using immediately.

!!The coconut will not come out white because I don’t use a whitening agent like the store-bought baker’s coconut does!!

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