Today's very short Facsin Friday post is about how to make coconut oil, or kaki. Kaki is a major part of life here in Kosrae and is used for a myriad of different purposes. Coconut oil is good for cooking and is a great moisturizer, it's also really good for your hair, especially when it gets fried from the sun and swimming in the ocean all the time. My host mom will make a batch of kaki every couple of months and I managed to help this time, for at least part of it.
The first step of making kaki is kwekwe kaki (grating coconut), a lot of coconuts. We use a small wooden stool that has a semi-circle of toothed metal on the end. The picture below shows my host sisters grating coconuts. Grating coconuts isn't particularly difficult, it just takes a long time and you have to grate a large number of coconuts when making kaki. The second picture shows less than half of the coconuts that we grated, there was another pile that I didn't get a picture of with even more husks.
Host sisters grating coconut and host mom squeezing ground meat to get milk.
A small portion of the coconuts we grated.
Coconut milk waiting to be boiled.
After grating the coconut, you have to squeeze the meat to get the milk. The milk is then boiled over the fire. While it's boiling, a film appears on the top which has to be skimmed off and thrown away. My host mom will also add flowers to the oil which makes it smell really nice. This is about the point where my host sisters and I got really tired and accidentally abandoned my host mom to finish making the kaki. You unfortunately don't get a lot of coconut oil at the end of all of this, I think we only made a few 8 oz bottles of kaki. Since this is such a labor intensive chore with very little pay off at the end, more and more families in Kosrae no longer make kaki and instead buy bottles of kaki sold at various stores around the island. This is not an option in Walung, so most families still make their own kaki.
I'm currently in Pohnpei for our Mid-Service Training (MST) and will try and post a regular update while I'm here as well.
I'm currently in Pohnpei for our Mid-Service Training (MST) and will try and post a regular update while I'm here as well.
