Sweetened Condensed Coconut Milk - Dairy-Free and Homemade

By Hklbrries

Around the holiday season, there are several desserts and treats that seem to require sweetened condensed milk as an ingredient. For me there’s only one we make. It’s this one that we featured here last year. I’m pretty excited to try it out with this whole food ingredient instead of the sweetened condensed milk.

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I’m not a dairy-free girl, by any means, but we don’t buy milk, since we don’t drink it often enough or use it in cereal or anything. So when the opportunity came up to make sweetened condensed milk I opted to make this dairy free version, simply because we always have some coconut milk on hand. Now, if you have your heart set on a dairy version, Kitchen Stewardship has a great one that doesn’t require powdered milk like so many of them do.

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I got the inspiration for this one from And Love It Too. I used honey instead of agave, since I’m still on the fence about it being a fairly processed sweetener, so I chose to use honey. If you are following a vegan diet then you can sub in your sweetener of choice. I also added a final ingredient, but it’s completely optional.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups coconut milk or 1 can of coconut milk
• 1/2 cup honey or (vegan can use agave) or sweetener of choice
• 1 tsp vanilla (optional)

Preparation

Step 1

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk can of coconut milk so solids and liquid are incorporated together. Stir in honey. Whisk it together.

Heat the coconut and honey mixture on the stove. Bring to a very low simmer. Once it comes to a simmer, turn it down as low as it will go. Basically, you're just evaporating some of the water content in the coconut milk. It's OK if there are some "dots" remaining, it just means some of the solids haven't fully incorporated, which is normal.

Basically, you bring it to a simmer, let the water evaporate, don't cover it. This will take between an hour to two hours. Although it's a lengthy process, hands-on time is minimal as you're just basically putting it on the stove.