Technique: Making Fresh Coconut Milk

Each vendor has his or her technique for separating the firm white flesh from the dark brown shell. In Vietnam I have witnessed a seemingly fragile woman deftly swing a machete to break the shell off piece by piece. The flesh was then mechanically ground and pressed to extract the coconut milk. In Malaysia they usually split the coconut into halves and then shred the meat by pressing the nut onto a rotating spindle armed with shredding spikes. At Chatuchuk market in Bangkok, I saw a rotating gear that caught the edge of the coconut and jammed it downward into a metal wedge to separate the flesh from the shell. The meat was then ground by machine. I was astounded to see the purity achieved by simply pressing out the milk; the ground flesh was transferred to a muslin sack and then placed in a hydraulic press to expel the thick coconut cream. I even brought back one of these spiked heads from Asia and had the maintenance crew at the Culinary Institute of America mount it onto a rotary motor so we could make fresh coconut milk on campus. The students really got a lot of pleasure from tasting the fresh milk, even though we used canned milk for all of our cooking.