He ignored the audience's questions, instead grabbing and opening two coconuts. He chugged the water from one to soothe his throat.
After pouring the water from the other coconut into a bamboo tube, he took out his combat knife. Flipping it over, he used the rough spine of the blade to scrape out all the fresh meat from inside the shell.
Fresh coconut meat is quite easy to scrape off. It doesn't require much force—any relatively hard tool will do the job.
However, the meat scraped out this way often has small bits of the shell mixed in, which affect the texture and must be patiently picked out.
Once that was done, the coconut meat needed to be finely chopped—the finer, the better.
But he had a simpler, cruder method in mind.
With a flick of his fingers, he sent the blade into a couple of flashy spins before gripping the handle and pounding the piled-up coconut shreds inside the shell.
With each strike, the shredded coconut meat visibly compressed.
