You will agree with me that coconut oil is very healthy for cooking, for your skin and for hair growth. Coconut oil is usually sold in small quantities, priced high in the market and it is difficult to find it in the store shelfs.
That’s why I feel it is really necessary to spill out the fact that you can save money and get the oil you want by doing it yourself. You could even venture into the business and be among the entrepreneurs making money from coconut oil production.
So here are the simple steps to produce your own natural coconut oil.
Buy the coconut
Go ahead and purchase the coconut, get healthy ones and try to get as much as you can (coconut is not expensive). In this trial case, you can get 3 or 4.
Break it open
Open the coconut with a knife. Be careful so you wouldn’t cut yourself and if you actually can’t open it, get someone to help you with it. You could drink the water inside (It wouldn’t make you dull).
Remove the meat from the shell
Remove the white coconut meat from the brown shell with a knife or with that coconut peel thing. You can slide your knife in between the meat and the shell and ‘pop’ pieces off, rather than slip, and cut your hand.
Cut the coconut meat into small bits
You can now cut the coconut meat into small bits and throw away the shell. If you don’t have a blender, you don’t have to cut into bits, you can just grate the coconut with a grater.
Blend the coconut bits if you have a blender
Pour into the blender and blend the coconut till all the bits are broke down. You can add water to blend if it’s hard to blend.
Filter the coconut milk
Pour the coconut milk through a coffee filter or any fine filter. You can even use a piece of cloth. Press the filter to recover as much coconut milk as you can (you really don’t want to waste anything).
Leave the milk to settle down
Allow the milk to settle for about 12 hours while the coconut fat forms a foamy top cover (you may use a transparent jar so you can clearly see the two separate layers). Don’t leave the milk to settle for more than 24 hours as it can be contaminated by microbes with time and cause the final oil to have an unpleasant odour.
Separate the foamy top layer
Using a spoon, carefully scoop the top foamy layer into a frying pan. Heat for 20 to 30 minutes (depending on water content) till the residue is completely burnt leaving clear coconut oil. Note that this final burning may produce a lot of smoke, so you may want to do it outside or shut some doors.
Yeah! You have your pure and natural coconut oil.
Also posted on ericadianas.com