The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Puerto Rican · Drink

Coquito

  • Easy
  • 12 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost
  • Vegetarian

warm-spiced · rich · floral · silky Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, richness that coats and comforts, melting away silken.

Ingredients

  • 400 ml coconut milk
  • 400 g cream of coconut
  • 350 ml evaporated milk
  • 200 ml sweetened condensed milk
  • 350 ml white rum
  • 2 cinnamon sticks
  • 4 cloves
  • 120 ml water
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

Equipment

Blender · Grater / zester

The skills inside

Straining & passing through a sieve

Allergen screen

Found: dairy · alcohol

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

  1. Simmer the cinnamon sticks and cloves in the water for 5 minutes, then take it off the heat and leave it to cool; steeping beats stirring in ground spice, which stays gritty on the tongue. 5 min
  2. Blend the coconut milk, cream of coconut, evaporated milk and condensed milk with the strained spice water until uniform and lightly foamy, about 30 seconds.
  3. With the blender on its lowest speed, pour the rum in a thin steady stream, then the vanilla and nutmeg, and stop the moment it comes together.
  4. Bottle and refrigerate at least 24 hours for the spice to spread, then shake hard and pour over ice into small glasses. 600 min

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes

  • Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
  • Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
  • It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
  • The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
  • The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.

Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.

At the Table

The Pour
It is the pour
Also Right
Serve alongside something salty and fried
From the Taps
-
Zero-Proof
Already zero-proof unless you made it otherwise

This is the glass, not the plate: judge it on temperature, dilution, and balance, and let the food do the answering.

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Coquito Technique: Building an emulsionThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Puerto Rican kitchen