The easy way to open a coconut

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

So as I promised, here is the easy way to open a coconut. It may look long, but this is one of those processes that takes longer to describe that actually do.

You need a bowl, a kitchen knife and the coconut.

1. Place the coconut in your hand so that the ends are at your wrist and fingers and the equator of the coconut is in your palm perpendicular to your body.
2. Hold the coconut over the bowl and with the back of the knife, I'll say that again, the back of the knife thwack the equator of the coconut one. Nothing will happen yet, don't worry.
3. Rotate the coconut a quarter of the way (or a fifth, it doesn't have to be that accurate) around in your palm along the equator of the coconut. So basically the highest point of the coconut's equator comes round towards you.
4. Now thwack the next part of the coconut's equator once with the back of the knife.
5. Rotate again, and repeat thwack, rotate, thwack, rotate until you hear the coconut hiss at you when it cracks. You'll only need to thwack it with the back of the knife once or twice more for the crack to now run all the way around the equator (approximately). Insert the tip of the knife blade into the crack and rotate carefully. The coconut will crack open and fall into 2 pieces. The liquid inside should be collected in the bowl that you remembered to put underneath before you started! You can strain this liquid to remove the coconut husk fibres that will have found their way into the bowl as well.
6. Now you should have 2 halves of a coconut that just need the flesh cutting out. The easiest way I have found is to score the flesh all the way to the shell with a sharp small knife. I quarter each half.
7. Then insert the tip of the sharp knife carefully into the area of the coconut flesh skin and the shell and gently rotate the knife. If your lucky the flesh will start to ease away from the shell. Remove the coconut flesh and repeat with next quarter...
8. Repeat step 6 & 7 with the other half of the coconut.

All done

The back of the big knife was used as the thwacker and the small knife for scoring and prising out the flesh.

 

[Yorky]

There are some strange contraptions here:

 

[Yorky]

My wife just chops the top off with an old knife: