Pure Food Life

Those intimidating Coconuts: Debunking Coconut Purchasing/Utilization Questions So That You Too, Can Enjoy Coconuts All the Time

                Coconuts, like avocados belong to a select group of vegan raw foods that are fully expendable by the body despite their creamy/starchy texture, so it remains sad to me that young Thai coconuts just don’t get as much love and attention as our avocados.  Those of us who live a cleansing lifestyle at all levels rely heavily on avocados as a delicate source of flavor and as a clean source of fats so that we can sustain our clean diets without having to revert to unclean options as often.  I have found that coconuts are a wonderful choice for the same reasons but that they are not utilized as frequently due to a number of reasons.  These reasons include the fact that they are rather bulky, hard to find in stores, intimidating to open, as well as the level of uncertainty that comes with what we are purchasing.  When you pick out a coconut, unless you have a trained eye, it can be very hard to tell what the water to meat ratio of the coconut is.  Most people on a cleansing lifestyle are smart individuals who recognize the financial challenges of living on an organic fruit and vegetable based diet and simply are just not willing to shell out $2.50 on a piece of fruit that may be turning rotten, have very little water in it, or have very little meat inside of its core.  Because of this uncertainty most people buy double the amount that they will need in order to ensure that they don’t have to run back to the market once they realize that they’re coconut didn’t deliver the goods.  .  All of these reasons can make the young Thai coconuts quite intimidating; I have even met raw food coaches who do not use coconuts because they are afraid to open them.

                Due to these reasons (and my unconditional love of fresh coconut water) I would like to cover some things that I have learned about purchasing and dealing with coconuts through months of trial and error.  First of all, when picking out your coconut you must become a white supremacist.  Always pick the whitest looking coconuts you can find, with the least amount of brown spots on the coconut.  At first I thought that this was uncut away bark but it is actually a sign that the coconut is beginning to age.  Secondly always look at the bottom of the coconut.  The bottom of the coconut is the part of it that provides us with the best reflection of the contents of the coconut’s interior treasures.  Ideally the bottom will be marble white just like the rest of the body, free of cracks and hard to the touch.   As a coconut ages the bottom of it starts to turn pink and brown, the shades range from light pink to a bright fuchsia color.  The more exaggerated the pink, the more rotten the coconut is.  Also, an aging coconut will have cracks on its bottom and will be soft to the touch, sometimes so soft that you can push your finger right through the protective bark layer.  It would be unfair for you to buy a young coconut with these characteristics.   

                Regrettably, just like in life, you can’t always have your cake and eat it too when it comes to your young Thai coconuts.  In other words, the meat to water ratio of a coconut usually varies: if there is a lot of meat there will be less water, and if there is a lot of water there will be less meat.   As a coconut matures it begins to transfer its water content to meat content so as it ages it becomes more fleshy and less watery.  Regardless of how white the outside and bottom look, it is very hard to tell the nature of each coconut’s ratio without opening it.  All of these reasons can make the young Thai coconuts quite intimidating; I have even met raw food coaches who do not use coconuts because they are afraid to open them, as I mentioned before. This is regrettable to many, depending on what they want to do with their coconut, eat a great starchy meat for a snack or to drink the water while fasting or before the urge for juice comes.  As a person who drinks many more coconuts a day than she can eat, and has a boyfriend who loves to eat their interiors, I got sick of opening tons of coconuts just to find that half of the ones I opened or more had no meat in them or had a slimy texture that I did not desire.  I also got sick of throwing out coconuts without knowing that they may have had some of the best quality meats inside of them but was too lazy to open them or simply ran out of room in my fridge.  Therefore, I found a way to figure out the meat quality of a coconut.  First you bang two holes in the pointed top of the coconut with a screw driver and hammer.  The duel holes allow air to pass through one end of the coconut so that the water can come out of the other side; since the interior of a coconut is a vacuum, water will not come out otherwise.  After draining the water, place a straw into one of the holes and slowly push the straw down into the coconut until you feel the plastic tip slicing through meat, continue slicing through the meat until you hit the hard bark at the bottom.  Do this a good few times in different spots of the interior of the coconut so that you can get a feel of the overall consistency of the fruit.  If you feel the straw slicing through a thick amount of meat and don’t just hit bark right away, you’ve got yourself a coconut worth opening!

                Now the best way to open a coconut that I have found is with a sharp serrated knife or meat cleaver.

                1.Turn coconut on its side

                2. Use knife to slice away the bark of the coconut on the pointed side from the edge of the circle to the point. Work your way around the entire coconut until a circular patch of bark is exposed.

3. Once the bark is exposed take the back of your meat cleaver and whack it into the outside of the bark circle and pop the top off like a soda can by pulling the knife downwards.  If you are not so strong like me, take a hammer and use the back of it to hack into the edge of the bark circle and pry it open as if the hammer was a crowbar prying open a door.

“Health Benefits Brief”

I do not want to spend much time on the health benefits of coconuts since you can find it very easily on the internet or in books, but it has lots of potassium and magnesium in it that makes it very good to drink while exercising, since it replenishes the body of lost minerals.  It is also a sweet light drink that can be enjoyed in the morning before juice, because it’s cleaner than juice.  It is water that has been filtered through the husk of the tree with the addition of electrolytes, minerals, and sugars.  One great trick for my casual drinkers: If you drink a liter of coconut water before or after you drink alcohol you will not get a hangover… I REPEAT YOU WILL NOT GET A HANGOVER!! So yes you can still wake up on time and go to work after a night out.  The genetic makeup of a coconut has the same make up as our blood plasma, which is why it is used as an IV drip in third world countries.  Since its contents are so similar to our genetic makeup, it is very useable by the body and creates next to no metabolic waste in the body.  This indicates the superior ease with which it digests. 

I would like to post a video on how to open a coconut, but until I do please go on YouTube and find a video.  Once you get good at it, coconuts are no longer so intimidating.  Also, you can expect a post tomorrow or later today about the broken mind-body connection, and a frightening new societal indication that it is broken and how it all ties into disordered eating.