Coconut milk is one of the most delicious and practical milk alternatives and has a range of health benefits. It’s also a popular ingredient in many healthy recipes. However good coconut milk can be quite hard to come by, and while canned coconut milk is popular and readily available, it has many different additives and additional ingredients such as guar gum and carrageenan which make it slightly less natural and beneficial than pure, all-natural coconut milk.
While canned coconut milk is still ok in some circumstances, the more additives and processing you can avoid the more likely you are to take back control of your body and your health.
There’s another benefit to making your own homemade coconut milk too, and that is that it can be a lot cheaper than buying canned or ready-made cocomilk, so you can save money whilst also taking care of your health.
You may now be thinking that there has to be some sort of drawback, or that the process of making homemade coconut milk is difficult and time-consuming.
You’d be wrong though! Making your own homemade coconut milk is actually quite simple and even enjoyable, and can help you to avoid the drawbacks of canned and preserved coconut milk entirely.
In this guide, we’re going to show you how to make coconut milk in the comfort of your own home in a few easy steps, giving you maximum peace of mind about what you’re putting in your body.
Ingredients
There are many ways to make coconut milk, and there may well be many gourmand recipes and traditional methods for making it, however, keeping things simple is the best way to make your life easier and to get a great tasting coconut milk that does exactly what you want it to.
There are only 2 ingredients needed to make amazing homemade coconut milk and there are;
Water
Shredded, unsweetened coconut (sometimes known as desiccated coconut)
This is literally all you need to avoid all the cost and additives of shop-bought coconut milk, so it’s really crazy that more people don’t make their own at home!
It’s also very easy to make, only taking 10 minutes, and that includes cleaning up after you’ve finished!
Now let’s look at the process itself!
How to Make Coconut Milk at Home
The first thing you’ll need to do is prepare your blender and make sure that you have something you can use for straining. Nut milk bags work great for this, however, you could use a mesh sieve with a fine grain, or even cheesecloth if you don’t have a nut milk bag to hand.
All you need to do from here is add the shredded or desiccated coconut to your blender and add a good amount of water to get a nice consistency. You’re looking for something fairly thin but some texture to it, as the blender will break up the coconut and thin things out even more.
Of course, if you prefer a thicker texture, or aren’t sure about how much to add, add slightly less than you need, because you can always add some more and continue blending, but you can’t take any water out once you’ve added it in!
Once you’ve added water and coconut to the blender, start the blender on a high setting for around 3 minutes, or until the entire mixture is in a liquid state and there are few to no visible chunks of coconut in the mixture.
From here you want to carefully pour the mixture into your strainer of choice, ideally a nut milk bag, cheesecloth, or a fine mesh sieve if you have no alternative.
Make sure to pour over a bowl so that as you pour the mixture over your strainer you catch the delicious milk, while the sieve or strainer catches any chunks that were leftover from the blending process.
Depending on how well you blended your mixture and how much water you added there may be more or fewer chunks, so be aware that this could change.
The great thing about using a nut milk bag or even cheesecloth is that once all the chunks are inside it you can usually squeeze a little extra milk out of this with your bare hands, getting as much value as possible and wasting as little as possible.
If you’re using a sieve, you can use the back of a large spoon or tablespoon to press the chunks into the sieve and milk a little extra this way also.
If you use cheesecloth or a nut milk bag you may need to pour a little more slowly to avoid spillages and to give the material time to sift out the chunks.
What to do with your milk?
Now you’ve got a delicious and totally fresh batch of coconut milk, you may be wondering how best to preserve it.
The best thing you can do is keep your coconut milk in the fridge. Now it’s important to note, it can stay in the fridge for up to a week, but over the course of this time, you may notice that it starts to separate. This isn’t a problem, however, and all you need to do is shake it up before using it to re-blend everything together.
You can also freeze your coconut milk for later use. One of the best ways to do this is to pour it into ice cube trays and then once frozen, decant the cubes of frozen coconut milk into a freezer bag or freezer-safe container.
This is a nice touch because you can add these already frozen cubes of coconut milk to desserts and smoothies really easily, or they can be thawed out quite quickly as and when you need them and they’ll be very refreshing.
