While I hardly ever buy cream, I do occasionally buy coconut milk for curry recipes. These recipes note that you can replace the coconut milk with cream; this got me wondering about doing the opposite. It worked pretty well when I made a sweet potato risotto, but it was a fairly small part of the recipe. This time I want to try making an alfredo sauce using coconut milk. Obviously, in alfredo the cream is a major ingredient, so the different flavor of the coconut milk will have a more pronounced effect. I don’t mind a different flavor as long as it tastes good, though.
Has anyone tried this before? How’d it turn out? Can I follow a regular alfredo recipe and swap out the cream, or should I change something else as well to compensate for the flavor difference?
Texture wise, it might work better with coconut cream rather than milk. But my WAG would be that it would taste unpleasantly, overwhelmingly coconutty. Myabe subbing 1/2 the cream for coconut might be better?
Hm. I was able to turn up this recipe for a vegan-friendly alfredo that uses coconut milk, so it would appear that it’s at least doable, but I’m not vegan, so unless it either tastes like regular alfredo or is different in a good way, I don’t see much point in making it. Honestly, I was interested in trying it mostly because I already have coconut milk and don’t often buy cream, but I’m probably better off just buying some cream and saving the coconut milk for curry or something else that actually calls for it. That said, if anyone’s tried it and has a really good recipe, I’m certainly willing to give it a shot.
You can substitute regular milk in the curry recipes because the coconut milk is there largely for texture. You’ll miss the taste a bit, but there are so many other things providing flavor that it works. So in this case you are taking away a flavor, which can generally be done in a strongly flavored dish.
But in Afredo, coconut milk would add a flavor, which is harder to pull of in general. Add to that that alfredo is a mild dish that gets nearly all of it’s flavor from dairy, and you can see that adding a random bit of coconut flavor wouldn’t work out so great. It worked in your rissotto because the flavor of the sweet potatoes worked with and could partially mask the flavor.