Eating Fresh Coconuts: a Tale of Woe

By Dani

My Hubs and I recently bought a VitaMix blender, and we have been whipping up delicious, healthy smoothies almost every morning for the last month or so. One upside to having a juicer or heavy-duty blender is that it makes us more adventurous -- I'm much more likely to buy produce that I'm not sure how to cook or prepare, because I figure I can always throw it in a smoothie if it doesn't work out.

There is a downside to this philosophy though, and it was made manifest with my most recent failed purchase: a peeled organic coconut.

It looked like this (minus the straw and fancy stand, of course) and I thought, "hey it's already been peeled! We have loved fresh coconut on every tropical vacation we've ever been on! I've discovered smoothie-making heaven!" But it was not to be.

Once I got it home, I started choppping slivers of the outside "meat" off and put a few pieces into a smoothie. While most of the smoothie was greens and other fruits, this coconut made it completely undrinkable. There were tough, stringy fibers in every sip that could not be blended or chewed. In other words, it was super nasty.

So I started to think that the outside (even though it's peeled, perhaps the white part is still considered "husk"?) wasn't edible. However that means that there's very little usable in a coconut - just the water and the few teaspoon-fulls of flesh from the water cavity. Is that right? Perhaps being peeled (as was suggested in this Chowhound forum) is bad for the coconut and makes it tough?

This lady seems to think that opening up a fresh coconut and using every bit of it is a walk in the park. What do you think?

(Image credit: AgroFruits, who seem to also believe that peeled coconuts taste great and I am a failure.)

Comments

[LivLaughEat]

My family loves fresh coconuts and yeah it's only the inner inner layer of flesh that's edible. My dad buys coconuts like the one you have pictured and then hacks the top off with a hacksaw and we all drink the coconut water (which is what all those new fancy "coco vita" type products are). And then he takes a big metal spoon and scrapes the flesh out to eat. He manages to get more than a few tablespoons and thinks it's worth the effort. He picks the heaviest ones (the most water content) and thinks they are fresher and the inside coconut meat more tender. Sorry for the essay, didn't realize I had so much to say about eating coconuts!