How to: Show your coconut who’s boss

We mash ours up

We love old Levi Roots. We love his cook book. But bless him, there’s a lot of coconut involved. Ever tried to tackle one? They can be stubborn. Today we set out to make a tub of Levi’s traditional rice and peas, but before we could get into any of that, we gave Mr Coconut a good stern talking to. Here’s how our chat panned out.

Pick your eye

Coconuts have three eyes; two are hard, and one is soft. Test each of them with a sharp knife, and once you’ve found the softy, set to work on him to make a decent hole. Now drain the juice.

Smash the place up

There’s no point beating about the bush here - you need to break through the hard outer shell to stand any chance of getting at the bounty. You could probably take a hammer to it, but we’re chaotic folk, so we took our nutty adversary outside and smashed his head into the paving. Not so tough now, are you?

Knife time

Carry the coconut shards back indoors, and with your sharpest small knife, set about prising the flesh from the inner shell layer. This can be tricky, so why not treat yourself to a little nibble on some of the peelings?

As you like it

Levi told us to grate our coconut, so grate we did.

Squeeze

Next, we added water to the shredded (and by now, pretty defeated) coconut. We picked up clods of the stuff and squeezed and squeezed until poor old Mr Coconut had no delicious juice left to release.

He was done.