Recipes with coconut

In the kitchens that use it, coconut is not a dessert flavouring: it is what stands in for butter, cream and stock all at once. One palm yields a water, a flesh, a thick milk and an oil that is solid at room temperature, and each of those four does a different job in the recipes below.

Coconut milk is the cooking medium of all South-East Asia: it carries curry pastes without scorching them, as in Thai green curry and tom kha, Indonesian sayur lodeh or Malaysian laksa. Sri Lanka goes further and cooks its rice in it to make festival-day kiribath, while pol sambol grates the raw flesh with chilli and lime.

The Caribbean and East Africa use it differently, as the base of a stew — ital stew, maharagwe — or in a risen dough, as in Jamaican coco bread and Kenyan mandazi.

Two practical rules: buy only coconut milk whose label claims at least 60% extract, and never let it reach a rolling boil, or you will watch it split into oil and grains.