Tag Archives: Asian

We’re so pleased to welcome Suzanne Kahn, a history grad student and author of the food blog, An Overdetermined Life, to share this post on making coconut milk at home.

 When I started writing about how coconut milk gets made, I envisioned a Mr. Rogers-like adventure through a coconut processing plant. I did not picture myself standing in my kitchen at 11:00 o’clock at night with a coconut and a hammer.

But here’s the thing. The more research I did about how coconut milk gets from the coconut to the can, the simpler it all seemed. In fact, I learned, it’s so simple that home cooks can and do make it themselves. To really understand how coconut milk gets into all those cans at the store and in your Blue Apron boxes, I decided, I would have to do it myself.

In retrospect, it’s not particularly surprising that making coconut milk is simple. Coconut is a vital food for much of the world’s population. Despite the difficulty of opening one (hence the hammer), once inside, you find nutritious food and reliably potable water. Before setting out on long sea voyages, crews used to pack coconuts as an all-in-one food and water supply. The outside of a coconut is also more than useful—whole, it serves as a flotation device; its outside shell can be burned as charcoal; its fiber turned into rope. The coconut’s many uses have been known since ancient times. This means you don’t need much fancy equipment to make coconut milk (or other products)—although, of course, electricity does speed up the process.

Now, I would never suggest that making coconut milk is something you must—or really even should—do. There are plenty of perfectly delicious cans of coconut milk out there. But, I will say this. If you are someone with more hardware than flatware in your home, someone who doesn’t have a lot of kitchen appliances but does have a blender for the occasional margarita party, making your own coconut milk is an adventure that you could embark on.

So, here’s how it works—in your kitchen, or in the factory that’s making coconut milk to sell in cans:

First, you have to get in to the coconut. This is not the easiest task. Off the tree, a coconut has a thick husk, the part that gets peeled away to make rope. There are now industrial de-husking machines, but traditionally the de-husking was done by smashing the coconut into a spear anchored in the ground. (Try not to wince as you watch people do this on YouTube. The spear comes very, very close to their wrists.)

By the time you or I buy a coconut, the husk has generally been removed. This leaves a thick, hard, outer shell. In factories, they have whirring blades to cut through them. In your kitchen, you whack it with a hammer, a lot. Eventually it cracks open. (Note: If you are doing this at home, before you crack a coconut open it’s worth draining out the water, which puts the coconut water you buy in stores to shame. To get at it, just use a nail to put two holes in the coconut and pour.)

Once the coconut is open you have to pry out the white meat with a knife and then peel off the final layer of thin brown skin. This is where I started to wish I had factory-quality equipment to help me out.

Next, the meat then gets shredded. In a factory, the meat gets fed into a machine and comes out the other end looking a lot like the shredded coconut you can buy in bags in a store. The shredded meat then gets mixed with hot water. In your kitchen, you can combine these steps and throw chunks of coconut meat into a blender with 2 cups of water.

Finally, the coconut pulp gets strained through a mesh cloth (you can use cheese cloth or a cloth napkin). You end up with rich coconut cream and finely shredded coconut meat, which can be strained a second time to get a thinner coconut milk often used in soups. And that’s it. After you get into the coconut the whole process can’t take more than 5 minutes.

The coconut milk, left alone, behaves exactly like coconut milk in a can: it separates. You get a thicker cream on top and a more watery substance below. Here’s where factory-made coconut milk is different from what I made, many factories add emulsifiers to prevent separation. In some recipes, though, you want to be able to scoop that separated cream off the top of a can so you may want to check for coconut milk without emulsifiers. When choosing a coconut milk, you might also check the water content, as many factories thin their coconut milk with water or the second, thinner round of coconut milk. One way to check how much cream is in a can is by shaking the can and listening. You don’t want the milk to slosh too much.

Coconut milk is a key ingredient in many South Asian and Caribbean cuisines as well as in the cuisines of the Pacific Islands and Brazil. Americans discovered coconut milk relatively recently and largely through these cuisines. Increasingly, Americans have also embraced coconut milk as a dairy alternative. There’s a lot you can do with a can of coconut milk, which is why I generally keep one on hand, but if you happen to get your hands on a coconut and a hammer you might also try making your own.

You’ll know you’re making it pretty much the same way people have for centuries. And, in the words of my boyfriend, mid-hammer whack, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had in the kitchen.”

We’re so pleased to welcome Suzanne Kahn, a history grad student and author of the food blog, An Overdetermined Life, to share her musings on what miso means to her daily diet in light of its long history and nutritious makeup, the second part especially relevant, as we’re talking wholesomeness on the blog all month. If you’ve ever had a period in your life where you subsisted on instant ramen (and haven’t we all?), you’ll definitely identify with Suzanne. 

Miso soup is the original instant soup. Not Cup Noodles, not cans of tomato soup, not those packets of dried Thai noodle soups.If you’ve got some miso paste in your refrigerator, miso soup can be as quick and easy to make as any pre-packaged soup. Toss in some rice, veggies, and maybe some protein, or try noodles and tofu and mushrooms, and you’ve got an instant, satisfying, and healthful meal. I started with some precooked brown rice, tofu, and avocado, but pretty soon was experimenting with other combinations. Miso soup was my gateway into more adventurous cooking for one. It felt like I had begun to feed myself like a grown-up.

Five years later, I still turn to my original miso-avocado-tofu combination when I’m running low on time or inspiration. When I’m throwing a dinner party and suddenly worry I haven’t made quite enough food, I often pull together a fast miso soup using garlic, tomato paste, miso, and maybe some tofu. Miso is a good thing to stock in your refrigerator, and, these days, it’s not hard to find. Whether in your local grocery store, natural foods store, or Asian grocery, you can usually find miso. In fact, you’re more likely to be overwhelmed by the options than have difficulty tracking it down.

This was not always the case. Until the 1960s, most Americans were not familiar with miso. Even today, though there is widespread familiarity with miso soup on Japanese menus, most of us don’t know the history of this ancient ingredient or much about the many varieties we might see available.

So, without further ado, a miso primer–the story of what miso is and how it became (almost) as popular with Americans as instant ramen.

First, the basics. Miso is made from fermented soybean. The process is generally started by mixing soybeans with a cultured grain (most commonly rice or barley). The cultured grain, known as a koji, is made by inculcating the grain with the mold aspergillus oryzae. The soybeans are mixed with the koji, water, and salt and then allowed to ferment for anywhere from a couple of months to three years. Miso is thus a living food like yogurt and many cheeses.

People have been making miso in Asia since ancient times. The practice is believed to have originated in China, where fermented soybeans are known as jiang. In the 700s, the fermentation practice spread to Japan. Centuries went by. Then, Japanese immigrants brought miso-making to the United States in the early 20th century. The first miso company in the U.S. opened in Sacramento in 1907. Over the next 15 years, four more miso companies opened, all in California and all founded by Japanese immigrants. These companies seem to have produced miso mainly for the tightly knit Japanese immigrant community and did not sell to a broader audience. It was not until the 1960s that Caucasian Americans began to try out the product.

Read more: Blue Apron Recipes with Miso

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans discovered natural foods (along with environmentalism, folk music, and the sexual revolution). This is when miso came into the consciousness of Caucasian Americans. It was the macrobiotic food movement that gave miso its first push into Caucasian American’s consciousness, according to John Belleme, one of the authors of The Miso Book. 

In particular, a Japanese immigrant Michio Kushi began to train people in macrobiotic eating. Consuming miso was central to this diet, because of miso’s many purported health properties. Kushi opened a natural food store in Boston, Erewhon Natural Foods Market, and began importing large amounts of miso and selling it to New Englanders. As people trained by Kushi spread out across the country they introduced Americans to miso and the natural foods movement embraced it wholeheartedly.

Around the same time, Americans began to embrace sushi, first at high-end restaurants in Los Angeles and New York, bringing a second audience to miso, via the ominpresent miso soup.

This was also the moment when researchers began investigating the health benefits of miso. Studies claimed a wide variety of bonuses derived from eating the paste: protecting people from radiation poisoning, helping prevent cancer, and lowering cholesterol. In an era of concern about radioactive fallout and nuclear war, these claims also helped aid in miso’s popularity.

And so, it was in the 1970s that the first non-Japanese Americans opened miso production companies. Belleme, for example, founded his, the American Miso Company, in 1979. Since then, the popularity of miso has continued to spread. When the American Miso Company opened in the 1970s , it sold two kinds of miso and sold 80,000 pounds a year. Today, the miso makers produce seven kinds and sell 600,000 pounds a year.

So, how do you pick a miso? First off, buy a paste not the instant powdered stuff. The paste, which has the consistency of peanut butter, makes soup just about as quickly as the powder but retains more of the flavor and health properties. Miso paste varies both by what kinds of grains are used with the soybeans, the proportion of beans to grains, the salt content, and the length of aging. Sweeter misos are lower in salt and soybeans and ferment for a shorter time; darker misos are are higher in salt, higher in soybean content and ferment for longer. Which miso you buy depends on what you are making, but yellow (or medium, mild) miso falls somewhere in the middle of all of these measures and is the most versatile miso to keep on hand. It’s good in soups, dressing, and marinades.

You don’t have to be a microbiotic eater or a sushi enthusiast to keep miso on hand. I think it’s a pantry essential for the same reason I did just out of college—it’s not only delicious, it’s practically instant soup.