Shredding Coconut

I recently purchased a few “young” coconuts from an international market that were not quite the same as other young coconuts I’ve purchased. It looks more similar to a mature coconut (round, with the hairlike husk), but has a white shell. The water is fairly sweet but the meat is thick and tougher than most young coconuts. Anyhow, I was considering shredding and dehydrating the meat for future use and was curious if anyone has experience doing so. It seems a difficult task to shred it as it has a bowl shape, and I was curious if you might advise on how best to do this. Also if anyone has had success with dehydrating coconut, does it store well (I presume refrigerated)?

Comments

  • raw_earthraw_earth Raw Newbie

    Actually, I just did this last night for the first time—BUT with young coconut meat instead of mature coconuts. You might be able to do the same thing if you can separate the meat from the shell. I put the young coconut meat in the food processor using the shredding disc (it seems near impossible to do by hand!) and then dehydrated @ 105 degrees for about 10 hours. I don’t know how this will be in comparison to dried shredded mature coconut in recipes, but that’s what I’m planning on using it for. I think storing any kind of coconut you’ve dehydrated in the fridge is your best bet.

  • jenny2052jenny2052 Raw Newbie

    I didn’t know the white hairy coconuts were young! I guess I just thought they were a different variety of mature coconut.

    You might have already gotten past this point, but here’s what I do with coconuts. After I’ve drained the water from the coconut, I wrap it in an old towel, put it on the floor, and then bash it with a hammer until it is in smaller pieces (hopefully in about 6-8 pieces). Once it’s in smaller pieces, I use a knife to pry the outer and inner shells apart, leaving the thin shell on the meat. I find it easiest to peel the resulting shards of meat with a vegetable peeler. From there, you should be able to grate the individual pieces by hand or run them through the machine of your choice. The smaller pieces make the roundness less of a problem if you’re working with a flat hand-grater.

    The absolute easiest way to turn coconut into shredded coconut is to use a champion or omega juicer with the juicing filter on. Just feed the peeled coconut into the chute and out will come perfect coconut cream (in the juice area) and beautiful fluffy shredded coconut (in the pulp area). I did that for the first time this morning and it was amazing!

  • rawmamarawmama Raw Newbie

    Hi Jenny, I’ve done that too, but my coconut pulp has no taste at all then because the cream/flavoring is out of it…did you mix the cream back into the grated pulp, to give it back flavor, then dehydrate it? THanks :)

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