Let's make Horchata de Coco

Hi everyone and welcome back to my kitchen. Have you ever had horchata? You know, it's a milky looking drink that you find everywhere in Mexico. You can go into the Mexican grocery stores and you can buy a sort of prepared base for it. Not necessarily recommending that, but it is something that is so ubiquitously Mexican and so delicious I wanted to show you how to make it from scratch. But I'm going to take a little twist on it. A lot of the vendors put something like evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk in it. I'm going to use coconut milk here because I learned that down in the Yucatan and I want to share it with you. So pretty straightforward. You take raw rice and cinnamon stick. Okay, so go to the Mexican grocery store and buy true cinnamon there. Okay, that's the best stuff. The little hard sticks that you find in the regular grocery stores. That's not true cinnamon. That's actually cassia bark and it's got a very different flavor. So this is the real stuff. Canela they call it in Spanish in Mexico. So then I'm going to cover that with two and a half cups of water and I'm just doing this in a one quart deli container here. We put the top on it and you don't have to refrigerate this. You're going to let it sit for 24 hours. That's going to soften the rice and infuse the whole thing with that beautiful cinnamon flavor. So here's one that I started yesterday and I am going to pour it into the blender. Juice and all. Everything's just going to go in there. And then I'm going to put the top on it and I'm going to let this run as long as it takes to when I touch a little bit between my thumb and first finger there that it's smooth. Okay, that's what I'm looking for and that will take a slightly excruciating amount of time. Okay, I have a high speed blender here so it's taken me about three minutes to get it so that I can rub it between my fingers like that and it doesn't feel... there's a slight hint of grittiness but not very much at all. If you don't have a high speed blender then it'll probably take you maybe five minutes or so for that to happen. Okay, the next thing is we have to put the second batch of two and a half cups of water in there. I'm just going to blend it for a short time and then strain it. Now I have set up here a deep bowl with a strainer in it. This is just a medium mesh strainer and then I have a piece of cheesecloth, actually a double layer of cheesecloth that I wetted here and now I'm just going to pour this mixture into it. Now there's several different ways you can go about this. One is that you could simply just let it sit here and drain or you can kind of work the stuff around because you're going to have all of the dregs of the rice and the cinnamon in there so get most of that out of there and then you can just gently work it back and forth through the cheesecloth lined strainer. Just let it go down in there but pressing with a spatula will certainly help to get it through faster. All right, I'm going to gather up the sides of the cheesecloth and then just sort of strain down in here like that and we will set that to the side and then here we go. I am now going to put this back into the blender because we're going to add that coconut milk to it. So a can of coconut milk, I kind of cheated because it has a cap of coconut fat on the top of it and I took a spoon and broke it up there so it wouldn't just plunk out here. So it's going to plunk out anyway so I'm going to take this thing off here and then just pour it like that and then let that all plunk in there just like I said it was going to do. We have to blend it again because of the fat from the coconut milk. If we were doing this with say sweetened condensed milk or with evaporated milk you wouldn't have to put it back into the blender jar but to emulsify and give that really creamy texture to it from the coconut fat. Now we have to sweeten it and I'm going to put three quarters of a cup of sugar in here. This will make a lot. You can see that it's making about six little over six cups of it here and I'm going to turn it down just a little bit and then we're going to let this blend until everything is homogenous. So it's really as simple as that to make homemade horchata. Serve it over ice and you'll have one of the most delicious accompaniments if you're going to make Mexican taco night or something like that. This is the perfect beverage to go with it horchata de coco. Okay just because I know some of you are going to want to know this. This horchata de coco is super delicious with a shot of dark rum in it. Just saying.