How to Open a Coconut

C

CanDo

Joined
Mar 10, 2006
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Hello there,

Newest article on Klippe is "How to Open a Coconut". Thanks to Canis Vulpes for the photos! There's a cool knife, too :cool:

Check it out!





If you'd like to contribute an article or photos, please do!

Regards,

CanDo
 
When we were kids, my uncle came back from a trip to Florida with a whole coconut, including the big husk. We got to take it outside and see if we could open it. None of us had a knife bigger than a camper, so we tried to get the husk off with screwdrivers.

Some older guys stopped by and told us about opening them in the Pacific with machetes. "What's a machete?" (This was probably about 1950.)

The screwdrivers finally got the husk off and broke through the shell to the milk! :D
 
I once took the top off a coconut with a serated Spderco Delica.

-Chris
 
I like green coconuts ... I can cut a plug thru the husk and the shell with my opinel #10 and just tip the milk into a mug , then cut the thing into halves , again with my opinel , the meat is like jelly , eat it with a spoon , and the green shell is easy to carve into whatever , but it dries hard and tough after a day or so .

get the nuts green enough , and the milk is almost fizzy , but there is no meat to eat inside .

I kinda drive up into northern QLD every year at the begining of the wet season for the coconuts and mangos

there is not much that I like better than a feed of crayfish with mango and coconuts ... its the main reason for the drive , that the kids like the camping trip thatgoes along with it is bonus :)
 
Green coconuts are a staple in our family diet here. We buy them by the big sack every other Saturday. If you really are going to be in an area with lots of green coconuts then do yourself the favor of picking up a coconut tool. It looks like a push dagger with a pointy half-pipe shaped blade. You just shove it in and twist out a round core, insert straw and drink. After we drink them often the kids will bug me to open them up so they can eat the slimy meat. I use my Tramontina bolo for that.

The coconut in the photo above is a ripe coconut. They are very hard and the milk is very strong tasting. Green coconuts are very watery and slightly sweet. That hard shell is covered by a thick, tough fiber husk. Sharp thin bladed knives are best with green coconuts. Moras work very well. Mac
 
I think it's worth mentioning, although the pictures depict it, smacking it with a back of a knife works much better if you go across the grain rather than with it.
 
Acually the pacific islanders had a way of opening with just a sharp stick. They would bury the sharpened stake in the ground with the sharp point sticking up at a bit of an angle, then bring down the coconut on the end of the stick and twist. It was pretty quick, and no knife needed. They would use palm, or heart of palm and sharpen it on a rock.
 
I've seen that done for getting the husk off. It made me smile 'cos I live in the land of the health and safety jackboot, and the woman doing the work there was happily bent over a dug in spear, and banging them out like no tomorrow.
 
You guys know a whole lot more about coconuts than I do. If you have information that's not already in the article, just click the 'edit' tab at the top of the page and throw in a couple of sentences. One of the SysOps or I will format it later, so you don't need to worry about that side of things.
 
.45 ACP hardball in the center of mass...opens them right up.
grinning-smiley-021.gif




Seriously though, I usually just place the coconut on a hard surface and use a ball peen hammer. If you take it easy, and don't go all hard core on it, you can get it open with the meat nicely separated from the husk.
 
The ripe ones we always drilled out the eyes, poured out and drank the liquid then attacked the nut with a hammer !!
 
After I drain the juice, I just throw the coconut up in the air, so that it lands on a hard rock and cracks open. Simple.
 
The easiest way is just to give $1.25 to the guy on the side of the road with the pick up bed full of iced down green coconuts. He opens it, you drink and he takes the empty husk away. This does work best in Hialeah or Little Havana.:cool::cool:

For ripe nuts the safest way of getting the husk off is 2 straight claw framing hammers driven in back to back and used against each other to pry off sections of husk.

Never tried the stake thing, but it's close in principal, pulling off a section at a time.

Use of any blade on a ripe, hard husk is blood waiting to flow.

We pretty much didn't have any coconuts from the mid '70's till the late '80's. Lethal Yellowing wiped out over 95% of the trees and it was 10+ years before the resistant trees really started to bear.

Rob
 
It looks like they broke that coconut open with just a couple really hard blows. My wife grew up in the land of coconuts (Philippines) and she showed me how to crack open a coconut so that it broke very cleanly in half. Just start tapping medium-hard on the coconut with the back of a knife blade, rotating the coconut so that you keep hitting along the equator line. After a couple times around, it cracks open cleanly, and you have two perfect halves. No mess, no chunks flying off.

Then you sit down on that little filipino stool with the grating blade on the end, and grate the coconut into a pan. Instant grated coconut topping.
 
lambertiana said:
It looks like they broke that coconut open with just a couple really hard blows. My wife grew up in the land of coconuts (Philippines) and she showed me how to crack open a coconut so that it broke very cleanly in half. Just start tapping medium-hard on the coconut with the back of a knife blade, rotating the coconut so that you keep hitting along the equator line. After a couple times around, it cracks open cleanly, and you have two perfect halves. No mess, no chunks flying off.

Then you sit down on that little filipino stool with the grating blade on the end, and grate the coconut into a pan. Instant grated coconut topping.
Click to expand...


And, as a bonus, you have the makings of a fine bathing suit! :D

-- FLIX
 
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