Slides That Follow Your Voice: Indonesian Accent Cooking Show

Slide 1: Thin first, thick last

0:17Welcome back to the kitchen. Today we're doing something I've wanted to do since the first episode, and that my producer has been quietly moving to the next week for about two years. [laughs] Today is coconut milk. All of it. Where it comes from, the three stages it goes through in a pan, and why almost every dish you've ever burned with it was burned for the same reason.

0:40Let me start with the coconut itself, because the carton is lying to you a little. A mature coconut, the brown one, hairy, about one point two kilograms, gives you roughly three hundred, no, three hundred and fifty grams of white flesh.

Slide 2: From one coconut

0:56Grate it, add three hundred millilitres of warm water, squeeze it through a cloth, like this, and you have the first pressing, the thick milk, about eighteen to twenty-two percent fat. Add water again, squeeze again, and you have the second pressing, thinner, about eight percent. Some books say ten. Eight, ten, it depends on the coconut. Most recipes from my grandmother's kitchen use both, and they use them at different times, and that is the first uh... secret, and it's not a secret, it's just on page one of a book nobody reads any more.

1:35The book is my grandmother's. It's handwritten. It has oil on every page and a pressed flower in the middle that nobody can explain, and the coconut milk section is three lines, because she assumed you knew. I didn't know. I was thirty before I knew. Okay. The pan.

1:55Now, the pan. Thin milk goes in first, with your spice paste, and it simmers. This is stage one. The liquid is white, it bubbles gently, and the spices are cooking in water. Nothing can go wrong here, so this is where you answer the phone. No? That is a joke I do every week. My producer says it has never once worked. Fine.

Slide 3: Three stages

2:20After twenty-five to forty minutes, depending on your heat and your patience, the water has mostly gone and the fat begins to separate. The surface goes from white to cream to a kind of broken, glossy yellow, with small pools of clear oil. This is stage two.

Slide 4: Stage two: 25 to 40 minutes

2:39Here the spices fry in coconut oil instead of boiling in water, and that is where the flavour comes from, so put the phone down now.

2:49Stage, the third, wait, did I do two. I did. Stage three. Stage three is the one most recipes outside this region never reach, because it looks like a mistake. The oil darkens, the solids go brown, the smell changes from sweet to deep and nutty, and the whole thing starts to look like something you'd scrape into the bin. Don't. This is where the dish becomes itself, dish becomes itself.

Slide 5: Stage three: it looks like a mistake

3:20Another fifteen or twenty minutes here, stirring, and you have something that will keep for a week, and taste better on the third day than the first. I don't have a good explanation for the third day. It's just true.

3:34So why does it burn? It burns because people start with the thick milk, at high heat, and wander away. Thick milk has no water to protect it. The fat separates in five minutes instead of forty, the solids hit the pan, and the spices never cook.

Slide 6: Why it burns

3:52The thick milk goes in at the end of stage two, not the beginning of stage one. That's the whole lesson. Thin first, thick last, and stay in the room. [sighs] My producer is holding up a sign that says, you said that would be the whole lesson eleven minutes ago. Yes. The whole lesson takes forty minutes. That's the lesson. He's not laughing either.

4:18One more thing, about the carton. Carton milk is fine, I use it on weeknights, but it's usually seventeen percent fat and it has stabilisers, so it doesn't split as willingly. Almost.

Slide 7: The carton

4:32Okay. The paste is made, the thin milk is in, and we have thirty minutes to talk about chillies, which my producer has also been moving to next week. He's nodding. He has been nodding for two years. Next week, chillies. I've said it on camera now. Let's cook.