Toasted Coconut Milk

There is something about the aroma of toasted coconut. It is rich, warm, and complex. In the past, we have made toasted coconut consommé hoping to utilize these unique characteristics. The consommé was delicate and still evocative of the pleasures of roasted coconut. Still, we wanted to infuse that deep caramelized flavor in coconut milk. Our first tests produced really hot but still pale milk. It turns out that coconut milk needs some additional sugar to caramelize and develop the toasty elements. We ended up pressure cooking coconut milk in mason jars with the addition of some sweetened condensed milk. The results were amazing. The milk became a creamy version of the original consommé.

Our first application of the toasted coconut milk was with a roulade of kampachi with tomatoes and melon. The one flaw was that the milk went everywhere and people were chasing the milk across their plates. Since it was an intimate setting, the diners were comfortable tipping and scraping. As cooks, we noted the flaw in the dish and sought to make improvements. In order to control the texture of the toasted coconut milk, we added some agar so that we could make a puréed gel. The result is a delicious purée of toasted coconut milk which is easily eaten and can be enjoyed in both small and large bites. With the modification to the coconut milk, the dish became a bit cleaner in aesthetic and certainly easier to consume.