Coconuts - Mature and Young

[veganman]

It appears that the two coconuts are one and the same. It starts out as green and then ages into the brown. When green, the green husk is cut off to reveal the white shell we know as the Thai coconut. More water in the young, more meat in the older.

Is this everyone else's understanding? What I am confused about is why they don't pull the organic coconuts when they are young. That way we wouldn't have to buy formaldehyded ones from Thailand...

[luckitri]

I know the white husky ones as "young coconut" as both the Asian markets and the health food stores refer to them that way. I don't know if Thai coconut is the same thing. Elsewhere on here someone actually did a test with colored dye and immersed the coconut in it to see if the dye penetrated to the water and meat. It did not. I am not worried about the formaldehyde. It probably gets a little into the juice as I am draining it into the blender but probably not much as it goes so quickly. But yes, the brown ones are just old "young coconut." I suppose I might want a brown one if I ever make some of the recipes on here that call for coconut pie shell or something like that. I would like to know why some of the young ones go bad but none of the brown ones are ever bad. How do they know that the brown ones aren't gone bad inside?