Canned coconut cream

cheese_dave

cheese_dave

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I'm going a bit Thai cookery crazy at the moment. Doing a banquet for me and Mrs. Cheese this weekend. However, I'm trying to "crack" coconut cream (not milk) in a pan to separate out the oil and it's not happening. Then I've just read that canned coconut cream is pasteurised and homogenised, and this prevents it cracking (or splitting). I've ended up just adding oil to the coconut cream in the pan so that my curry paste will fry and not boil.

I thought to myself, "someone in TSR will know all about this". So here you go.

-insert Ollie "crack" joke here-
 
I used to use canned coconut cream a lot for my Sri Lankan stuff - eventually I tripped over Coconut Milk Powder in one of the Bengali/Pakistani foodstores in Rusholme and have been a convert to that. It's made by Nestlé and you can use it to make coconut milk or coconut cream - and of course you can make as little or as much as you like.

Works out to be about £10/kg for the powder but 1kg would make about 2/3 gallon of coconut cream (or a gallon of coconut milk).

No idea if it separates though :?
 
The last one on the left as you head towards the City Centre is where I got it (has a free car park which is also handy) - can't for the life of me remember what it's called, but I know they have a branch in Bradford.... it'll come back to me....

Worldwide Foods (may be called Al Halal now) - <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.alhalalsupermarket.co.uk/files/store%20locations.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.alhalalsupermarket.co.uk/fil ... ations.htm</a><!-- m -->

Maggi_CoconutMilkPwdr_3D.jpg
is the "domestic" box.
 
...or creamed coconut in solid bar form (8oz). I suppose you can reconstitute this in the same way, though I haven't tried.

Creamed-Coconut.jpg



I use it when I make a coconut curry, cut a lump off or grate, it dissolves nicely and not too rich or sickly. I doubt that it's been treated in any way. Usually about 40p, even available from a supershed nowadays.


I don't understand what you are trying to do, you want to "crack" CC so that you can use the oil to fry the curry paste? And then what?
 
I'm trying to fry the curry paste to release the aromatics before the meat goes in.

It's out of this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thai-Food-D...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265474036&sr=8-1

He IS the Thai cookery guru apparently (well, apart from Thai people I suppose). And I quote: "For coconut-based curries, the [curry] paste is fried in coconut cream, which first needs to be simmered slowly until it separates and is quite oily. This is important as the paste must be fried, not boiled - it makes a marked difference to the final taste."
 
Can't you build a refinery and distil the long and short chain oils for various nefarious purposes?

I'm imaging an Indian petrol-chemical plant all made out of corrugated iron and using only coconuts as it's raw input.

A bit like the Bagpuss' mice chocolate biscuit machine combined with a shanty town industrial estate and some earnest Hindu wallah filling out endless forms in triplicate and saying with the obligatory sideways wobble of the head: "Yes sir, we are cracking coconuts, fuel of the future!"
 
antdad said:
That's what I thought...but does it then re homogenize or remain split.

I would have thought that once separated it just remains so.
Click to expand...
It remains split. I dunno. David Thompson has forgotten more about Thai cookery than I'll ever know, so I have to defer to him on this subject.

For the record, SWMBO gave the banquet 9 out of 10. Bleh. She always marks high. I gave it a 6.5. My tastebuds are all over the place, I have no frame of reference for whether that was a good Thai meal or not. We ate all the food though.

What's Ollie on about?
 
Those are good suggestions. I've been using vegetable oil.

But I guess my original query wasn't around alternatives. I'm not new to cookery, but I am new to Thai cookery, so I was trying to follow David Thompson's instructions. I've cooked curry pastes in oil in the past. Perhaps the Thai's use their nearest source of oil, which is that produced when you "crack" coconut cream (in perhaps the same way that Italians use their nearest source of oil, olives), and that's what Mr. Thompson is trying to get across in his book.

No, my query really was around whether canned coconut cream actually does split, or whether I was wasting my time trying to get it to do so.
 
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