Homemade Coconut Milk and Coconut Flour

I made this homemade coconut milk and coconut flour using these instructions from All Sorts of Pretty's blog.  My point was actually to get coconut flour in order to make a gluten free almond birthday cake for my kids that my in-laws could both eat.  This coconut milk seems to be rather thinner than the stuff you get in a can from the store, so I'm not sure I'd use it to cook with it, but the coconut milk is a handy byproduct if you want to drink it.  The recipe is super simple, and all it takes is two ingredients:

2 cups coconut dried flakes (The recipe calls for unsweetened, but I used sweetened, because that's what we had in the pantry)
2 cups water

Place the coconut flakes and the water into your blender and let it soak for at least 2 hours (I let it sit there while running errands, so mine was closer to 4 hours).  

Blend on high speed for 3-5 minutes, or until it's a creamy and smooth consistency.  Place a strainer into a bowl and line with a flour sack towel or cheesecloth, and dump the contents of the blender into the towel-lined strainer, to let the coconut milk drain into the bowl.  I like using the flour sack towel because the tighter weave means you don't have to try to pick bits of coconut pulp out afterward.  Then, squeeze the pulp inside the towel over the bowl to get out as much as much coconut milk as you can (don't throw the pulp away when it's squeezed dry!).  Put the contents of the bowl into whatever storage container you're going to use for the milk and voila!  You have coconut milk!  I ended up with a little bit more than half a mason jar full of milk.

For the coconut flour, dump the blended up pulp onto an ungreased cookie sheet.

Preheat your oven to it's lowest temperature- for me that's about 150º.  Spread the pulp out into a thin layer on the cookie sheet, using a fork to break up any large lumps, and cook in the oven until completely dry.  If you touch the pulp and feel any moisture at all, it's not quite ready.  It took my pulp about an hour and a half to dry completely.

At this point, the pulp will be dry, but still very lumpy. 

In order to get it to a flour-like consistency, you'll have to blend it up, which I did using my blender for a few minutes.  The two cups worth of coconut flakes that I used yielded about 2/3 cup of flour.

This is not going to be the fine flour powder that you'll find at a store, but even with a bit of graininess, it worked perfectly fine for the recipe I used it in.

As I was looking around online, it looks like people who are regularly making their own coconut and almond flour frequently will buy a coffee grinder to get a better powdery consistency, so if this is something you'll be doing regularly, you should probably consider that.