Where to get coconut oil in Ireland

If you follow Authority Nutrition you will have read about the benefits of using coconut oil for cooking. You can read about this here and here. It was not always easy to get this in Ireland with the exception of health food shops.

It is now becoming much more widely available. About a month about I noticed they had it in Dunnes Stores, but just last week I went to buy some there and they now have about 4 different pack sizes and a lot more shelf space. So it seems that there is a lot of interest in the benefits of cooking with this stuff.

Here is the pack I bought and the image below is the nutrition information. This cost just under a fiver and it is organic, extra virgin etc. I saw a similar sized pack in a health food shop for over 10 euro recently.  It smells nice and is great to make an omelette. It does give a taste of coconut to your food, so it is not ideal for everything, but makes a good alternative to butter especially for things like curry.

The last time I bought coconut oil was in an asian market and it was the authentic Indian stuff. It had been processed by drying the coconut over fires made of the coconut husk. The smokey flavour of the oil was nice, but very strong. Not suitable for any except strong tasting foods like curry. Also it came in a squeezy bottle. This is no doubt the right container in India where the oil would be liquid at room temperature, but in Ireland this was solid pretty much all the time and so had to be scraped out of the bottle.

So Dunnes wins for coconut oil. This oil is also available in Super Value.