Even though we have goats, there are times when we just aren’t getting enough milk, or I want to make a dairy free recipe, like Coconut Milk Ice Cream!  Yum!  This recipe is so quick, easy and cheap to make, it just can’t be beat, and it’s soooooo tasty too! There’s also the bonus of free coconut flour as a by-product.  Win-win!  So without further ado, here it is!

Coconut Milk Recipe

Makes 1 gallon

Ingredients:

1 gallon filtered hot water

7 cups organic shredded coconut

Opt- sweetener, salt, vanilla

Place hot water and coconut (plus sweetener, salt & vanilla, if using) in blender, in batches if necessary, and blend on highest setting for two minutes.  

Pour through a strainer or cheesecloth.  ( I usually pour through a strainer first, then pour the milk through a cheesecloth, and then place the pulp from the strainer in the cheesecloth and squeeze it out.  That seems to go much quicker than just putting it all through the cheesecloth to begin with and waiting for hours for it to drip through). Depending on what you’re using it for, I’ve found that just using a good strainer really gets almost all the pulp out, and the cheesecloth is almost unnecessary, except for squeezing out the pulp at the end.

Store in glass jars in the fridge.  The cream will separate, and even turn solid, so especially while it’s cooling, I try to give it a shake every couple hours, otherwise you’ll have to blend it again to get the cream mixed back in.  (Once the cream turns solid, no amount of shaking will mix it back in!  ;)

Next spread the pulp out on cookie sheets, and dry in the oven on the lowest setting. Now you have coconut flour.  You may need to grind it in a blender or food processor to break up the clumps.