Pacific Islands · Sauce
Lolo (First and Second Pressing)
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 2 mature brown coconuts, about 1.4 kg together, heavy in the hand and sloshing when shaken
- 500 ml water at 60C (140F), hand hot and no hotter
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Pierce the two soft eyes with a clean nail and drain the water into a glass; that is the drink, not the cream.
- Tap the shell around its equator with the back of a heavy knife, turning the nut as you go, until it cracks open into two clean domes.
- Grate the white meat straight out of the shell on a coconut scraper or the fine side of a box grater; you want a damp fluff, not shards.
- Squeeze the bare gratings hard in both fists over a bowl until nothing more runs: that is the first pressing, about 250 ml, thick as single cream.
- Work the warm water into the spent meat, leave it ten minutes, then wring it out through muslin into a second bowl: that is the second pressing, thin and blue white.
- Keep the two apart and cold; within the hour the first pressing will set a firm cap of white fat on top, which you stir back in before use.
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
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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