Hometown Delights

Wife and I were out and about to do our grocery yesterday and much to our surprised, we found young coconuts on sale for $1.09. We decided to buy one for each of us as we knew that there aren't much of coconut meat and water coming out of each.

Almost the same size

When we were about to buy them, we knew we were going to have trouble cracking them open because of lacked of tooling at home.

Opening the first one was proven to be an issue. We used a medium-size kitchen knife and it wasn't effective enough to cut the skin.

Ineffective medium-size kitchen knife

Messy

For the second coconut, we decided to switch the knife to a more jagged kitchen knife. Result was way better.

Second coconut, let's try that again

Cleaner...

Cutting the top skin is the first step to crack open a young coconut. The next step is to actually crack it open... somehow. We didn't search over the net beforehand thinking that it was probably not too hard to do this task. We were, again, wrong.

What we did was we tried to find the "weak spot" and start hammering in a circle to soften the shell. Not that what we tried was completely the wrong but definitely we could do better.

Victory! (first coconut)

Second coconut (definitely has improved)

We ended up getting almost a litre of fresh young coconut water (and a lot of meat as well).

Yummy!

By the way, we broke the meat pounder during the process of cracking open the first coconut. Lesson learned: meat pounder is not a hammer to crack open a young coconut.

Here's a video on YouTube explaining how to open the young coconut. The video seems to skip a little bit but her technique is excellent. 

Along with coconut, we also got ourselves "Pempek" since wife was craving so bad. We bought them from someone we knew. Cost us $7.00 each.

Each portion consists of one mix of fish skin and two "sub-marine" type (not sure where the sub-marine comes from, probably because of the shape somehow...? although I still doubt that up until today). The sub-marine type has egg inside it. 

The picture above is before we deep-fried them (to make the experience eating them more enjoyable, of course). 

With sauce and seasoning

Next comes the sauce and the seasoning. The sauce taste a bit sour and spicy while the seasoning is just shredded fried ebi (small shrimps).

Overall the taste was okay. A little bit below our expectation but considerable substitution in case we decided not to make them ourselves (wife can make them but chose to try these ones first).

Later that night we taste the sweet victory of our earlier effort :)

We definitely will be buying more of them young coconuts.