Coconut milk and almond milk were the two biggest winners of the schism in the dairy industry. Coconut milk is healthy, tasty, and more importantly safer and more ethically extracted and produced than cow’s milk. But like any milk, it can spoil quickly. So, if you want to keep your coconut milk around for a while, can you freeze it?
Coconut milk can absolutely be frozen. Do not expect it to keep forever though. After about a month, the chemical bonds of the coconut milk’s ingredients will start to break down. There is no coming back from this, sadly. Coconut milk will last up to a month in the freezer.
Storing Coconut Milk
Coconut milk is rather easy to store, but there are a few effects that storage has on coconut milk that might affect how you go about doing it. This is because storing coconut milk will always impact its texture. Like its cousin, almond milk, coconut milk gets a lot of its texture from water. It is mostly water with coconut mixed in.
But while almond milk can separate and rebond with the water it is mixed with, coconut milk cannot. It separates slower, explaining its month long lifespan, but once it separates it is not bonding with anything again. In addition to this, the separation means that you will always have to be wary of its diminishing texture.
This means storing it in an airtight container, like a Tupperware container. Lacking that, you can also store it in an ice cub try covered in plastic. Ice cube trays might be the preferable option anyways, as it means you can defrost smaller portions of the coconut milk to use in recipes.
Due to the diminished texture of coconut milk after freezing, it is recommended that you use the coconut milk for recipes rather than for things like cereal or drinking straight. Using coconut milk for mac and cheese, for instance, will make use of it without relying on it to be good on its own.
