No Prepackaged Coconut Water Could Satisfy Me...Until I Found This
This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to our very opinionated editors’ favorite things to eat, drink, and buy.
For the three most simultaneously interesting and relaxing years of my life, I lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand. A lot of things were great about it, but my favorite thing was the coconuts. Real coconuts, lots of them, everywhere you turned—on the trees and in the markets, and not just the big, green, not-quite-ripe boys but the sweet tiny ones with brown crackable shells, too. Inside is the most delicious-tasting substance natural to this earth, full stop. Water so pure, so creamy, with the subtlest sweetness and an almost umami-like richness. Flesh thick and tender, detaching from the shell with the slight prod of a spoon. Once I learned of these coconuts’ existence, I’d have near-daily whole-body cravings for them, which I could satisfy by walking one block from my house to the fruit cart on the corner and buying a fresh one with a hot pink straw for 10 baht, the equivalent of about 33 cents.
Now that I live back in the tropical-fruit-forsaken United States, I miss coconuts more fiercely than I miss bum guns. And I tried, for years, to find a replacement. But while pre-packaged coconut waters are trendy and plentiful, none could compare. They were too sour, or too bland, or too saccharine with added sugar, or tasted too much like the vessel they came in (a box or a plastic bottle, not a coconut shell), or mixed with some bullshit ingredient like pineapple juice. When they came close to the flavor I was looking for, they’d be too prohibitively expensive for a person (me) who needs coconut water like some people need cigarettes.
And then, just when I’d given up all hope, I found Vita Coco Pressed Coconut. It sat demurely beside its lesser brethren (Original and Twist of Lime, I’m looking at you) in my local bodega’s display cooler, swathed in shiny cardboard like the others. But there, on the label, beside the big green coconut featured on all the other Vita Coco labels, I saw it: an additional coconut, this one hairy and brown like the ones I remembered so fondly.
My hand shot out before my brain even registered what I was doing and grabbed it. I paid the requisite $2.99, brought it home, poured it in a glass, and lo! It wasn’t clear or slightly yellow as those lesser coconut waters are. It was a beautiful milky white, with tiny particles of coconut flesh evenly distributed throughout so that they melt on your tongue with each sip. The flavor was creamy, subtle, umami-like, as it should be. It was the closest I’d ever come to an actual Thai coconut.
Today, I am a Pressed fiend. I’ll hit up multiple bodegas—my record is five—in search of Pressed. People will say, “The coconut water’s right here!” and I will curse them internally. “No,” I’ll mutter, closing the glass door with a thwack. And I’ll head on down the road, to the next shop, or the next, no matter how hot or cold or late I am. Why? Because the minute I unscrew that white plastic cap, I know I’ll be transported right on back to Thailand. Only Pressed can do that.
Buy it: Vita Coco Pressed Coconut, $30 for a dozen 17-ounce bottles at Amazon
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Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
