Cuckoo for Coconuts

In one of the courses I teach for a living at a career school, I introduce my students to the concept of scotomas.  A scotoma is a blind spot in one’s vision caused not by a malfunction in the eye, but rather by the brain’s seeming unwillingness to register the thing you are looking directly at or for.  You may also carry a scotoma towards a concept or idea, but the whole point is that you don’t know you have one until it’s gone – and everyone has them.  A relatively banal example is the dreaded car keys scotoma: you’re running late, and after a frantic search in which you up-heaved couch cushions, furniture, laundry and bedding, you find the keys sitting right where they belong or worse, in your hand (evocative of my average morning).

So it was that I discovered I had a coconut scotoma.  For nearly two years I had ignored raw recipes that called for young coconut because I was under the impression that they were not sold in my area.  This is because I was looking for big, green husked orbs like one sees hanging from the palms – a far cry from what they actually look like in the store.  I guess I had gotten this idea from a photo I had seen when I was younger of a vendor selling them that way on a beach.  The really sad thing is that I had actually seen young coconut in the store before, but I had passed them by thinking they were something else – perhaps some oddly prepared monster jicama?  Who knows…  

If there’s any preventing a scotoma, it’s first by ridding one’s self of as many assumptions as possible, and second, by arming one’s self with knowledge.  Thus here is the skinny so that one may not, like me, be a fat-head:

Young coconuts are sold in the refrigerated produce section of many grocery stores.  The green husks have been shaved off, leaving behind white pith shaped into a cone-topped cylinder.  You wouldn’t want to take the husk off yourself – it would require a machete and for most of us, a trip to the ER.  Coconuts in this form are highly perishable – many will not last in the fridge for longer than two or three days.  While opening the young coconut can be intimidating at first, by the second or third try you’ll already feel like a seasoned veteran! 

To open the coconut, take a large chopping knife and shave the rest of the pith from off the top of the coconut (where the cone is), revealing a portion of the wooden shell.  Once this crown is exposed, pummel around its circumference with the blunt end of the knife until the crown pops open.  I have found that the quicker you can rotate the coconut whilst pounding and the crazier you can get your eyes to look while attacking it, the sooner it will crack.  This is why it may be necessary to incorporate a war cry into this task.  I personally prefer “BANZAI!!!” or “FüR VATERLAND!!!”, but I suppose “Remember the Alamo” would work just as well.

Carefully jimmy the crown off the rest of the way with the sharp end of your knife, taking pains not to spill much of the delicious coconut water.  Pour the water into a glass and gently harvest the coconut meat with a downturned spoon.  The meat should peel off in a few large chunks.  Discard the shell and pick off any pieces of woody shell lining that may still be attached to the coconut meat.  Once you have accomplished this, the coconut is your oyster!