Twelve coconuts, one liter: how cold pressing works

Fresh milk, not copra

Most coconut oil on a supermarket shelf is refined, bleached and deodorised oil pressed from copra — coconut meat dried, often smoked, and stored before pressing. The refining exists to undo what the drying did. Virgin oil skips the whole detour: the meat is grated fresh, the milk is pressed out, and the oil comes from the milk.

Ours is pressed within hours of the fruit being cracked. The window matters because fresh milk begins to ferment quickly in Thai heat, and fermentation shows up later as free fatty acids — the thing that drags a smoke point down.

Centrifuge, then vacuum

Coconut milk is an emulsion of oil and water. A centrifuge separates the two by weight without heat, which is what keeps the oil 'cold' and its aroma intact. What comes off is clear oil with a trace of water still in it.

The vacuum step removes that trace. Under reduced pressure water leaves the oil at a low temperature, and the lot ends up measuring under 0.01 g of moisture per 100 g. That single number is behind two others on the label: a smoke point of 202°C (Central Laboratory, TRBK67/20255) and an accelerated shelf-life result of 1,933 days sealed at 25°C (TRBK62/06285) — drier oil oxidises slower.

Why the count is twelve

A mature coconut carries a few hundred grams of meat, and that meat is a little over a third oil by weight. Press it fresh, spin it, dry it, and the arithmetic lands at about twelve fruits for a liter. Producers who refine from copra and press harder can pull more oil per nut; what they pull along with it is the reason for the refining.

The count is on every bottle because it is the honest description of the product. Twelve coconuts, pressed cold, dried under vacuum. The ingredient list reads: coconut.

• Why our coconut oil smokes at 202°C, not 177°C →
• Coconut oil vs olive oil: which one, for what? →
• How to read a coconut oil label →