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A recipe asks for coconut milk. The cupboard holds a tin of coconut cream, a hard white block and a carton from the chiller. Will any of them do? Some will, with a little adjustment. One definitely won't. They're all made from the same nut, but they're made in different ways, and the difference is mostly about how much fat and how much water you're getting. Where they all start Every one of these products begins with the white flesh of a mature coconut. It isn't the clear liquid you hear sloshing about inside the nut. That's coconut water, a different thing entirely. To make coconut milk, the flesh is grated and pressed, usually with some water, and the rich white liquid that runs out is collected. Change how much water goes in, or what happens to the flesh afterwards, and you get each of the products below. Coconut milk This is the everyday one. Coconut milk is the pressed liquid from the grated flesh, loosened with water to a pourable consistency. Our RAWGORILLA Organic Coconut Milk contains 11 to 12% fat and just two ingredients: organic coconut extract and water. That's rich enough to make a proper curry and light enough to go into porridge or a smoothie without taking over. Use it for: Thai and Indian curries, laksa, dhal, soups, rice pudding, overnight oats and smoothies. Coconut cream Coconut cream is made the same way but with much less water, so it's thicker, richer and more intensely flavoured. Think of it as the double cream to coconut milk's single. RAWGORILLA Organic Coconut Cream is 24% fat, roughly twice as rich as the milk. It contains small amounts of guar gum and xanthan gum, two plant-based thickeners that help keep it smooth rather than grainy. Use it for: richer curries and satay sauces, desserts, dairy-free ice cream, panna cotta, and as a dollop over fruit. It also works in cocktails such as a piña colada. A note on whipping. Coconut cream will whip once the solid fat has been chilled. For the most reliable result, use a cream made specifically for it, such as Biona Organic Coconut Whipping Cream, at 30% fat. Chill the tin overnight, open it without shaking, scoop the thick part into a cold bowl and whisk. Creamed coconut This is the one that trips people up. Creamed coconut isn't a liquid at all. It's the whole coconut flesh, dried and ground into a dense paste, then set into a hard block. Nothing is pressed out and thrown away, so the fibre stays in. That makes it the most concentrated of the lot. Biona Organic Creamed Coconut is around 68% fat, with 16 g of fibre per 100 g, and its only ingredient is organic coconut. How to use it. Grate or chop what you need straight into a simmering curry or soup, and it melts into the sauce as it cooks. To make a quick coconut milk from the block, dissolve 50 g in 100 ml of warm water and stir until smooth. Use it for: curries and stews where you want coconut flavour without adding more liquid, and for baking, fudge and coconut ice. Because it keeps well in the cupboard, a block is handy to have in reserve for the evening you discover you've run out of tins. Coconut milk in a carton The coconut milk sold in cartons, often in the chiller or next to oat and almond milk, is a drink rather than an ingredient. It's much thinner than tinned coconut milk and is made to be poured over cereal or into tea and coffee. Many brands add calcium and vitamins, as Koko does. It won't give you a rich curry. Keep it for the breakfast table. Cream of coconut and condensed coconut milk Two more to know about, because they're sweetened and a mix-up can ruin a savoury dish. Cream of coconut is a sweetened coconut cream made mainly for cocktails. It's a different product from coconut cream, despite the near-identical name. Sweetened condensed coconut milk is the dairy-free equivalent of a tin of condensed milk: coconut cooked down with sugar until thick. Biona's version is made from organic coconut and organic cane sugar. It's brilliant in banoffee pie, fudge and iced coffee, and a disaster in a Thai green curry. If a tin says "sweetened" or "condensed", it belongs in pudding. Coconut milk vs coconut cream vs creamed coconut at a glance Coconut milk: pourable, around 11 to 12% fat. The everyday choice for curries and soups. Coconut cream: thick, around 24% fat. For richness, desserts and satay. Coconut whipping cream: thick, around 30% fat. For whipping and topping cakes. Creamed coconut: a solid block, around 68% fat, with the fibre left in. Grate it into sauces or dissolve it into a quick milk. Carton coconut milk: thin and drinkable. For cereal and hot drinks, not cooking. Cream of coconut and condensed coconut milk: sweetened. For cocktails and desserts only. Can you swap one for another? Mostly, yes. Here's how. Coconut cream instead of coconut milk. Mix the cream with roughly the same volume of water. Since the cream is about twice as rich, halving it with water brings it close to milk. Coconut milk instead of coconut cream. Harder, because you can't take water out easily. Use the milk and simmer the sauce for longer to reduce it, or stir in a little grated creamed coconut to make up the richness. Creamed coconut instead of coconut milk. Keep to the ratio of 50 g of block to 100 ml of warm water and scale it up to the amount the recipe needs. The result is a little thicker and more textured than tinned milk, because the fibre is still in it. Carton milk instead of tinned. Only in a pinch, and expect a thin, pale sauce. Why is my coconut milk solid in the tin? Nothing has gone wrong. Coconut fat is solid below about 25°C, which means a tin kept in a cool British cupboard will often have a thick white layer on top and thin liquid underneath when you open it. It's a sign of real coconut, and there's no harm in it. Either shake the tin well before opening, or tip everything into the pan and stir as it warms. It will come back together within a minute or two. Coconut milk with no added thickeners, like ours, separates more readily than one with stabilisers, for the same reason. Cooking tips that make a difference Simmer, don't boil hard. A rolling boil can make coconut milk look split or curdled, with oil pooling on the surface. It's perfectly safe to eat, but a gentle simmer keeps a sauce smooth and glossy. Add it towards the end if you want it fresh. Coconut milk added in the last ten minutes keeps a brighter, sweeter coconut flavour than one that has cooked for an hour. Try the Thai trick. In many Thai curries, the thick cream from the top of the tin is heated first until its oil begins to separate, and the curry paste is fried in it before the rest of the liquid goes in. It gives a deeper, more aromatic sauce. Store opened tins in the fridge. Decant what's left into a clean container, keep it chilled and use it within about three days. Leftovers freeze well in an ice cube tray, ready to drop into a sauce or smoothie. Where to start If you only keep one thing in the cupboard, make it a tin of coconut milk. Add a tin of coconut cream for puddings and richer sauces, and a block of creamed coconut as your backup. For a ready-spiced shortcut, the Wild Elephant Organic Green Curry Coconut Milk has the paste already stirred in. And for the rest of the coconut, including why virgin coconut oil behaves the way it does, see our guide to raw organic virgin coconut oil.

Pick up a jar of supermarket honey and turn it round. Somewhere near the barcode, in small print, there's a good chance you'll find the words "blend of EU and non-EU honeys". It sounds official. It isn't telling you very much. What the phrase tells you, and what it doesn't Honey labels have to state where the honey came from. When a jar holds honey from a single country, that country is named. When it holds honey from several countries, the label can use a general phrase instead, and "blend of EU and non-EU honeys" is the one you'll see most often. Read literally, it covers honey from almost anywhere in the world. It doesn't say which countries are in the jar, how many, or in what proportions. It doesn't name the beekeeper or the season. A packer could change the mix from one batch to the next and the wording on the label wouldn't need to change at all. None of this means blended honey is bad honey. It does mean the label gives you nothing to judge it by. Why honey is worth faking Honey is slow and costly to produce. Bees gather nectar from a huge number of flowers, carry it back to the hive, and then fan it until most of the water has evaporated. Only then is it honey. Sugar syrups made from rice, maize, beet or cane can be produced in bulk for a fraction of the cost. That price gap is the whole problem. A well-made mixture of honey and syrup looks like honey, pours like honey and tastes close enough to honey that nobody standing at a supermarket shelf could tell the difference. What the European Commission found Between November 2021 and February 2022, the European Commission ran a coordinated check on honey being imported into the EU. National authorities took 320 samples from incoming consignments and sent them for laboratory analysis. 147 of those 320 samples, or 46%, were flagged as suspicious of being bulked out with sugar syrup. "Suspicious" is a careful word. It means the laboratory results didn't match the profile of genuine honey closely enough to be passed, rather than that every one of those consignments was proven fake. Even so, it's a remarkable figure. The Commission published its findings under the title "From the Hives", and the full report is available on the European Commission's food safety pages. How syrup gets past a basic check For a long time, honey fraud was relatively easy to catch. Cheap syrups were mostly made from cane or maize. Both are what botanists call C4 plants, which process carbon slightly differently from most flowering plants. That difference leaves a measurable trace in the ratio of carbon isotopes in their sugars. Nectar comes mainly from C3 plants, so a laboratory could compare the two and spot syrup that didn't belong. Fraud adapted. Syrups made from rice or sugar beet come from C3 plants, so their carbon signature sits much closer to honey's own. Some syrups are now produced specifically to slip past the standard tests. The result is that no single test can be relied on any more. Serious producers use several, each looking at the honey in a different way, so that a sample has to pass all of them. The four tests behind every batch of our honey Every batch of RAWGORILLA honey is checked four ways before it goes into a jar. NMR profiling. Nuclear magnetic resonance reads the chemical fingerprint of a sample as a whole, measuring many compounds at once, and compares it against a large database of authenticated honeys. Added syrup changes that fingerprint even when the main sugars look normal on their own. Stable isotope analysis (IRMS). Isotope ratio mass spectrometry is the carbon test described above, used to look for sugars from both C4 and C3 sources that shouldn't be there. Pollen analysis. Honey carries pollen from the plants the bees visited. Identifying and counting it confirms the botanical source. This matters most for single-variety honeys such as acacia or linden, where the name on the jar is a promise about which flowers the bees worked. HPLC sugar profiling. High-performance liquid chromatography separates the individual sugars in a sample and measures each one. Genuine honey has a characteristic balance of fructose, glucose and smaller sugars. Syrups tend to disturb that balance or leave traces of sugars that have no business being in honey. The same batches are also tested for residues. Glyphosate, pesticides, heavy metals and a full panel of antibiotics all come back as not detected. What "organic" means for honey Bees fly wherever they please, so organic certification for honey works differently from organic certification for carrots. Under the EU's organic regulation, Regulation (EU) 2018/848, the rules reach out beyond the hive: Within 3 km of the hives, the bees' forage has to consist essentially of organic crops or wild vegetation. The hives themselves have to be built mainly from natural materials. Synthetic chemical repellents can't be used while the honey is being extracted. Colonies must be left with enough of their own honey and pollen to get through the winter. Feeding is only allowed if a colony's survival is at risk, and then only with organic honey, organic sugar or organic sugar syrup. Our honey is certified organic under that regulation by certification body BG-BIO-02. How to shop for honey you can trust You can't run an NMR scan in your kitchen. You can read a label properly, though, and a few habits go a long way. Look for a stated origin. A named country tells you more than a blend statement ever will. Look for a single producer. Honey from one producer can be traced back to its source. Honey pooled from many suppliers is much harder to vouch for. Look for an organic certification code. Certified organic honey carries the code of the body that inspected it. It's small, but it's there. Don't rely on kitchen tests. You may have come across advice about dropping honey into a glass of water, dabbing it on your thumb or trying to set it alight. None of these reliably detects added syrup. A thick, well-made adulterated honey can pass every one of them, and some genuine honeys fail. Crystallisation isn't a purity test either: it's perfectly normal for real honey, but it proves nothing on its own. We explain why in our guide to why honey goes solid. Be wary of a price that seems too good. Honey costs real money to make. A very cheap jar of it had to come from somewhere. Why our honey is sourced this way Everything above explains how the RAWGORILLA honey range is put together: a single European producer, certified organic beekeeping, and four separate authenticity tests on every batch. There are five honeys in the range, and they're very different from one another: Organic Acacia Honey, pale, mild and slow to set Organic Linden Honey, intensely aromatic with a herbal finish Organic Wildflower Honey, the everyday jar, varying gently with the seasons Organic Forest Honey, dark, malty and made from honeydew rather than nectar Organic Blossom Honey with Honeycomb, liquid honey with a hand-cut piece of comb in the jar If you're not sure where to start, our guide to choosing a honey takes you through all five, from the palest jar to the darkest.