Interesting question. At first I was going to offer my slam it on the
sidewalk method, but you don't want the easiest way to remove the meat;
you want the best way to keep the shell intact. I'm native to Miami and
always remember cheap tourist souvenirs of painted coconuts. The shells
weren't broken, and they didn't seem to go bad. Hmm. How did they do
that? Maybe holes were drilled and the insides coated with some sort of
shellac? Even if you heated the whole thing so the meat drew away from
the shell, you'd still need a pretty big hole in order to get an
instrument in there that would get the meat out.

--Lia


Bob wrote:
> The subject says it all; what's the best way to remove the meat from a
> coconut shell? I already figured out how to crack it open, but
> removing the meat from the shell has proven to be difficult.
>
> I'm actually not interested in the meat for eating, I just want to
> remove the meat from the shell so I can use the shell for art purposes
> without it going rancid.
>
> So methods that ruin the meat are perfectly acceptable for my purposes
> here.
>
> I'd just rather not plug away with a knife. I tried that for about 5
> minutes and came to the conclusion that it would take a real long
> time.