I love baking.  I don't do it often, but the nostalgia of the holiday season always brings out that side of me (and of course bulking season, so I mean I may as well enjoy it, yes?).  While recipe testing for the my ebook with Anne Marie Garland, Paleo Cookie Exchange, I realized that our fudge recipe that we were "paleo-fying," if you will, called for evaporated milk.  Well... that's not paleo.  And I tried looking up dairy-free alternatives for evaporated milk, but they all involved soy and/or rice milk.  So what did I do?  Create one that didn't call for those things, of course!  This is an easy way to get around highly-processed traditional evaporated milk while using all paleo ingredients.  Give it a go next time you're doing some primal baking!

Dairy-free Evaporated Milk

Prep time: 1 minute   Cook time: 50 minutes   Total time: 51 minutes

Yield: 3/4 cup evaporated milk

Directions

Ingredients

  1.  Pour coconut milk into a medium-sized pot.  Refill the can with water and add that to the pan, too.
  2. Heat the pan on medium-high over stove until it reaches a boil, about 5 minutes.  Reduce heat slightly if it begins to boil over, but allow to continue boiling for another 45 minutes or so, until the volume is reduced by half.  The bubbles will go away for the most part at this point and you should see a line at the top of the pot where the liquid used to be compared to where it is when it is done.  The end result will be thick and creamy.
  3. Use as a 1:1 replacement for traditional evaporated milk in recipes you are trying to remove dairy from!

1 can full-fat coconut milk

Equal amount of water (use the coconut milk can to measure out water once milk is poured out)