A handy way to store coconut milk

Coconut milk is an ingredient you reach for more often than you would expect once you start making spice curry. I love pho, and for a while every weekend I would spend half a day making it from scratch, starting with a chicken bone stock, chasing the ultimate bowl. (I have not made it in a while, but it occurs to me right now that bringing elements of pho into a spice curry might be interesting.)

I have wandered off the point, but pho uses plenty of coconut milk too.

Now, about coconut milk: you open a can, use 3 tbsp, and there is still a great deal left. You can pour it into a container, but there is one problem. It keeps separating. You can shake it and shake it and shake it before using it, but I always felt I could never quite use it at an even consistency.

Then a customer who had read an earlier piece of mine,

[The GG problem] Grating garlic and ginger is a chore. Here is what to do

told me that at their house they freeze coconut milk in zip-lock bags as well.

Of course, I thought. And at the same time: is that really all right? I had frozen cheese and milk before, and when I thawed them to cook with, something in them seemed to change. They went lumpy, or turned watery.

So I ran a test.

To give the conclusion first: it is completely fine. It is called milk, but of course it is not a protein-based milk. Whether I heated the frozen block in the microwave, let it come back to room temperature, or added it still frozen partway through cooking a spice curry, it worked again without any trouble.

As before, if you store it in a zip-lock bag at a thickness you can snap pieces off, coconut milk becomes dramatically easier to live with. So here it is, shared.

If you have a storage trick of your own, please do send it our way.