We should all know by now that I love coconut. It is great in stirfry’s, smoothies, oatmeal, trail mix, mixed with chocolate or anything else you can imagine. I love it!
I buy unsweetened shredded and dried coconut in bulk, along with coconut water, coconut milk and coconut ‘ice cream’.
So, I thought it was about time that I try to open my own coconut. I decided to go with a regular coconut over a young (baby) coconut that are so widely available nowadays. Below is a step by step tutorial on how to open a coconut.
How to Open a Coconut
* you will need a coconut, hammer, nail and dish towel!
1. Find the 3 ‘eyes’ on one end of your coconut.
2. Take your hammer and nail, and make a hole in each of those ‘eyes’.
3. Before smashing open the coconut, you’ll want to drain our all of the juice inside. Tip your coconut over and place onto a cup, bowl, etc in order to drain. (I ended up needing to shake the coconut a little bit in order to get the juice flowing.)
4. You will end up with a cup of juice/water and your empty coconut.
**Unfortunately, at this point I realized that my coconut was bad! I was so bummed considering that I just bought it a few days ago. This goes to show what happens when produce needs to travel from Mexico! But, I kept going with the process to show you guys what to do.
5. Now, take your coconut and wrap it in a dish towel, or another towel you won’t mind washing! At this point, I moved to my floor because I did not want to end up smashing my counter. 🙂
6. Take your hammer and SMASH the coconut! It took me a few good wacks until I ended up with this.
There you have it! Delicious coconut meat!
See how it is a little brown in there? Definitely a sign of a rotten coconut. 😦 I’ll try again sometime soon, though!
Do what you wish with the coconut meat – pop it in a smoothie, cut it up and eat it as is, dry it for trail mix – the possibilities are endless!
Enjoy.
healthy laps 
I love that you opened the coconut yourself! I’ve never done that and really enjoyed seeing your pictures of it!
Yes, the yellow color of the coconut water/juice was a hint that all was not well with the coconut. I opened one this morning, the water was clear but there wasn’t much of it. When I got it opened the whole meat fell out covered with slimy black 😦 That is the first time I have ever opened a rotten coconut.