Here’s something I didn’t know about coconuts until very recently, despite being from the land of those nuts (well, you can read that however you want)…
Out here, we get coconuts at the grocery store either as a whole or split into half-shells (unhusked in either case, thankfully); and something that I’ve personally struggled with is to separate the meat from the shell. Since I don’t have one of those scrapers to do the traditional method of making coconut shavings, I resort to buying frozen coconut shavings from the local Indian store.
One of my colleagues was on a visit to Hawaii recently, and here’s an easy method to separate the meat from the shell, that he learnt while he was there: put the coconut in the freezer overnight and the meat will detach from the shell thanks to relative expansion! Now, considering that this isn’t rocket science, I’m guessing a lot of people know this already, but was news to me when I first heard this. Personally, I’m a lil’ disappointed that I didn’t think of this approach until now since I grew up seeing copra made at home (in a nutshell, it is the process wherein you dry the coconut under the sun so that the meat shrinks as the moisture evaporates, and it separates from the shell). Ah, no wonder common sense is an oxymoron!
Marko
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