Nata de Coco (Fermented Coconut Jelly)

Variations

• Nata de piña: the original, made from pineapple juice and produced since the eighteenth century. As ko.wikipedia records, nata de coco was developed in 1949 by Teódula Kalaw África, a chemist at the Philippine National Coconut Corporation, as an alternative to nata de piña, which depended on a pineapple harvest. Commercial production began in 1954, and the process was optimised in the mid-1970s by a team of microbiologists led by Priscilla C. Sánchez.
• Coloured: the commercial product is dyed red, green or pink. The photograph on this page is the red one. A mat as it comes out is whitish and translucent, and the colour goes in with the syrup.
• In halo-halo: where most people in the Philippines meet it. When that page argues for one soft thing against one crisp one, this is the crisp one.
• In drinks: the chewy pieces in bottled jelly drinks are this.
• The same material as a kombucha pellicle: cellulose built by the same family of bacteria. In kombucha it is the thing you throw away; here it is the food.
• Industrially, nitrogen is added: a nitrogen source such as ammonium sulphate raises the yield. At home you can leave it out and the ferment simply takes a few days longer.

Tips

• It is not a ferment that transforms an ingredient; it is one that manufactures a new one. The cabbage in kimchi is still cabbage afterwards, the beans in miso are still beans, and the beans in tempeh are knitted together by hyphae but they are still beans. Here the bacteria eat the sugar and excrete cellulose, and the cellulose piles up at the surface as a mat. What reaches the plate is cellulose the bacteria built, and the coconut water was fuel and is gone. Tempeh is the closest and the difference is exact: there the hyphae bind beans that are still the food, and here there is no substrate left in the product at all.
• Having no flavour is the point. Pure cellulose has no taste and no smell and humans cannot digest it, so it carries almost no calories, and so it is always sold in syrup. Every other ferment here exists for what it tastes like. This one exists for a texture.
• Do not touch the tray. These bacteria need oxygen, so the mat is built at the boundary between liquid and air. Knock it once and the sheet sinks and a new one starts above it, leaving you two thin sheets. Natto and miso also let air in deliberately, but here the growth is at the interface itself (fermentation basics).
• Shallow and wide. The depth is the thickness and the area is the yield. The same litre in a deep bowl gives far less.
• The acid is poured in. Fermentation basics says the safety of a ferment comes from the acidity dropping, and kimchi and paocai make that acid themselves. Here it comes out of a bottle, as it does in pikliz.
• Boiling the sourness out is not optional. Skip it and the vinegar is still there under the syrup. Thicker cubes take longer.
• Against tokoroten and yokan: those set a gel from a seaweed polysaccharide, and agar melts again above about 85°C. Cellulose does not melt at all, which is why the cubes hold their shape through boiling and candying.
• If you have no starter: the mother at the bottom of a bottle of unpasteurised coconut vinegar is the easiest one to find. A batch that fails outright has usually been too cool or not acid enough.