Kitchen Products
This kitchen mate is another item that exists in the Indian and South Asian kitchens for a number of years. This is a must have in the South Indian homes where the cuisine involves a lot of freshly grated coconut in almost every meal.
The core element of this humble tool is a semicircular metal plate made of mild steel or iron which has short sharp conical teeth all along its circumference. In the manual scraper this plate has a metal handle which is fixed to a rectangular wooden block. This block is fixed at approximately 45 degrees angle to a larger rectangular wooden base which helps in placing the scraper on any flat surface like the floor or a table top. People normally squat with a leg folded over the scraper’s base on the floor to grip it tight to prevent sideways movement, during the process of scraping. There are also hand held scrapers where this plate is fixed to a wooden handle or embedded in a plastic moulded handle. It’s only useful in scraping small quantities of the kernel at a time.
Table top coconut scraper
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Detail of the scraper blade
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Hand held stainless steel coconut scraper
Method of Scraping:
A coconut is broken into two halves. One half is positioned in such a way that the scraping plate with the teeth is enclosed inside the coconut’s hemisphere and the short sharp teeth are in contact with the tender white kernel of the coconut. The coconut hemisphere is firmly gripped with both the hands and by applying pressure it is moved in lateral directions which helps scrape out the kernel. By frequent checking and repositioning the coconut hemisphere over the scraper plate the entire kernel can be scraped into fine shreds in few minutes.