Tap Lessons

Sago isn't the only palm that's mined for food in the Philippines. Nipa (Nypa fruticans) - and other palm varieties, including coconut and aren - are tapped to produce suka (vinegar), a Filipino kitchen staple, mildly alcoholic tuba, and more alcoholic laksoy. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia this same sap is boiled to make sugar. Such may also have been the case in the Philippines before the Spanish introduced cane sugar cultivation.

You'll often hear it said that coconut, aren, and nipa vinegar (and gula Melaka) are made from the sap of palm trees. That isn't quite the case - what's tapped are not the trunks of these trees but the stalks of the trees' flowers. Among the three varieties the nipa palm is unusual in that its stalk is cut and the sap harvested only after the flower has bloomed.

Nipa palms grow in muddy areas near brackish water. Unlike coconut palms, they're low-to-the-ground; their trunks actually grow horizontally beneath the surface of the earth, with branches jutting up in clumps. This makes harvesting the tuba (sap) relatively easy as the tapper doesn't have to scale a ladder to ready the flower stalk and collect sap.

Above, a resident of Barangay Banza in Mindanao's Butuan City prepares a flower stalk for tapping, by bending it down and away from the trunk of the palm, rubbing it with mud, and massaging it. The idea is to loosen the fibers inside the stalk enough to get the sap flowing without pulverizing them; this he'll do a couple times a day for a couple of weeks.

To determine whether or not the stalk is ready to be cut, he hacks away a bit of the flower to get at one of the white crispy nuggets hiding inside each 'petal'. These 'nuts', by the way, are also harvested and eaten as is or candied to make a nata de coco-like treat sometimes called 'palm seeds' and sold in jars of sugar syrup. They show up in halo-halo, and, in Vietnam, in a similar ice treat called che.

The stalk is ready for cutting when the flower's nuts are sweet (they also taste a little coconuty). The flower is taken off about six inches from where it attaches to the stalk and, once again, mud is rubbed along its length to draw the sap out (this is the last time the stalk will be mud-rubbed).

If the tapper has accurately gauged the readiness of the stalk then sap should start flowing right away.

It's captured in a bamboo tube that's attached to the end of the stalk.

The tuba is collected twice a day. Its sweet stickiness gums up the end of the stalk, so after each collection the tapper slices off about a half centimter or so to keep the sap flowing.

One stalk will produce tuba for about thirty days, by which time it will have been sliced, bit by bit, almost to the trunk.

Tuba begins to ferment almost as soon as it drops into the bamboo tube (sugar makers employ a variety of means to hinder fermentation). After it's collected it's added to a big wooden barrel. If left for three days it becomes bahal, the lightly sour, ever-so-slightly alcoholic beyond-tuba-but-not-quite-vinegar that Butuan City Market's kinilaw master Leo uses to dress his fresh fish.

After thirty days the tuba becomes suka. Our host in Butuan City adds extra flavor to his suka in the form of fresh chilies, onion, garlic, ginger, and lots of black pepper. This elixir we greedily spooned over everything from rice to grilled fish to fresh seaweed.

Or, fermented tuba can be made into laksoy, a clear alcoholic beverage. This still, set by the river and shaded by nipa thatch (yet another use for the palm - roofing and walling), is fueled by wood and turns twenty gallons of tuba into about one gallon of laksoy. The stills here in Banza are made of lawaan wood or stainless steel. Wood makes for a much more fragrant laksoy, we're told.

Inside the still, the tuba is heated to boiling. The steam that rises condenses on the still's concave metal cap and then drips through a tube, out and into a waiting jug.

The first round results in a lightly cloudy beverage. Laksoy isn't crystal clear - and doesn't earn the designation 'first-class' - until it's been distilled a second time. We found first-class laksoy to be more palatable than expected, with a wee bit of a floral scent - definately not rot-gut 'white lightning'. Some locals let raisins and/or ripe jackfruit macerate in the laksoy before cracking the bottle. If we had a jug of laksoy we'd treat it as we sometimes do rum: add mango, pineapple, lime rind, and a bit of vanilla bean and stow it away to flavor for thirty days.

In the barangay stills are a communal asset, supporting on average twenty families each. One lapad (flat, 'pocket-sized' 375 ml bottle) of laksoy fetches 10 pesos (about 25 US cents).

It may not be the tree of life, but the nipa palm is integral to the livelihood of this barangay, at least. The captain tells us that seventy percent of Banza's population is involved in the production of tuba, suka, and/or laksoy, as well as the harvesting of nipa 'nuts'.

Comments

[luckyfatluke]

Wow, you guys never fail to amaze me with your unique posts. you just can't find this information in books!

[RST]

Technically, sukang Paombong refers only to the nipa palm vinegar produced in the town of Paombong, Bulacan and should not be used for vinegar produced around Butuan City.

The substantive is "suka". This is the name of the product: "suka". The -ng ending of suka in sukang Paombong indicates that the word has been modified by another word/adjective: suka from the town of Paombong.

(Maybe I should write sukang paombong. The current convention seems to put even place-name-modifiers in lower case, cf Saveur's teltow turnips-turnips from Teltow-in the last December issue. Or maybe this is a Saveur quirk.)

Re: nata de coco

You are thinking of something else, not "nata de coco". For nata de coco, see the long magisterial article on it in Culinaria: Southeast Asian Specialties. You are thinking perhaps of "kaong" which is sometimes labelled as "toddy palm seeds", "sugar palm" etc but as far as I know kaong is made from Arenga pinnata not from nipa.

Great report! great pics!

Cheers,
Richard

[RST]

I just looked up the Culinaria pages on nata de coco: oops. It's not quite as long as I remembered it-but it's still pretty comprehensive. Nata de coco is coconut/sugar water that has been gelatinized with the help of acidophilus bacteria. The gelatin occurs spontaneously to a limited extent in the making of vinegar; it was in the Philippines that the entire long process (of fermentation/gelatinization, repeated pressings, pasteurization etc) was formalized and product first made on a (relatively) large scale.

Here's some more stuff on it from the web:
http://gyreworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-know-i-have-written-about-this-before.html

and a derivative commercial product reported by noodlepie:
http://www.noodlepie.com/2006/01/17_aloe_vera_na.html

Sukang Paombong is readily available in US Asian groceries. It's a superb, quite unique artisanal vinegar and excellent value at about $1.25 a 750 ml bottle (use it to make kinilaw!) Bec vinegar is quite stable, this product is quite pure and unadulterated (I think the processing merely involves coarse filtration).

Robyn, have you posted on the process of making the fantastic nipa palm sugar (from Melaka wasn't it?) that you brought for the tasting at your palm sugar lecture in Chicago last year (I think I still have some left in my pantry)? If not, this might be the time to do a companion post to this on it!!! It would be most intriguing specially in light of the tidbits on nipa palm sugar making that you dropped above (e.g. "sugar-makers use various means to hinder fermentation" etc)

Richard

[marcos calo medina]

hi robyn,

nice post on the vinegar! i've already sent the address to my relatives in butuan. by the way, leo the kinilaw master was thrilled when he saw your post. he had the pages printed and said he'd have them laminated for his stall in the butuan market.

your knowledge of southeast asian vinegars i think would be an excellent, full-blown magazine article (gastronomica?), or even a book. vinegar is such a defining ingredient, especially in mindanao.

i'm glad you mentioned the process from bahal (or bahalina, depends on whom you're asking in butuan) to laksoy (which the airlines still ask me to unload everytime i go home).

i'd be interested to know how nipa and coconut vinegar in agusan and surigao compares with other southeast asian traditions. specifically, the various ingredients used to induce and arrest fermentation.

you remember the powdery stuff that man in an orange t-shirt was carrying on his belt? that's "tungog," a mangrove-like tree which the visayans use to slow the fermentation process, so that the sap doesn't turn acidic so fast (i don't know what tungog is in english...calling richard, paki-research nga). in between, of course, you have the bahal.

sorry i forgot to tell you that paombong is a town in bulacan, and only the vinegar from there is called sukang paombong. kinda like ..you know... appellation controllee..

or whatever.

best,
marc

[Robyn]

Thanks luckyfatluke. We really enjoy doing these kind of posts

Richard - noted and changes made. (I need to study some Tagalog.)Note that I wrote nata de coco-LIKE. Yes, aren palm seeds are made into the same sort of treat.But the texture is kinda the same.
As for palm sugar - those posts will have to wait. As I think you know we have other plans for the results of that research....
I am so jealous that you can buy sukang paombang in Chicago.

Marc - that's nice about Leo. It was the least we could do after he made that he fed us that spectacular kinilaw on the spot in Butuan City. Could go for a big plate of it RIGHT NOW!
Coconut palm sugar makers in Malaysia use the bark of the cengkal tree to arrest fermentation. Lots of interesting little tricks of the trade in palm sugar production, from arresting fermentation to coloring. I'm sure it's the same in PHI vinegar production. Merits some study...

[jay p]

hmmm if i remember correctly Tuba is the fermented coconut sap which is in turn distilled into lambanog.

is it really called the same thing if it comes from nipa?

[Robyn]

jay - tuba (in the PHI) is fermented palm sap whether it comes from coconut, nipa, or other palms. From 'How to Drink in Cebuano', an essay by historian Resil Mojares (thanks RST):

"The better kind of tuba is extracted from coconut palms but other varieties are made from the nipa palm, buri palm, the ambung and pugahan palms, and the idiok (sugar palm), the fermented sap of which is called habyog."

The same word - tuba - is also used in Indonesia, by the way.

[Nate 2.0]

Robyn,

another mind-expanding post! How I would love to have a bottle of that pepper-and-garlic-flavored suka.

[Nik Go]

Great post! Very informative.

Tangal or Tungog is ground bark of a mangrove specie (ceriops tagal of the Rhizophoraceae family)

I'm very curious about how others "employ a variety of means to hinder fermentation." I've once read from some local literature (DOST??) that chilies are used by some nipa vinegar makers instead of tangal or tungog.

If you're a wine maker, you might be familiar with Campden tablets (potassium metabisulphite) which does the same job. Can't seem to find any local source, though.

If anyone knows anything more, please post.

Thanks.

[Shan]

Hi Robyn
Do you know much about making vinegar from sweet sorghum?
Thanks

[Marie]

this is very interesting. I've been to Butuan just last week for this purpose and it's interesting someone had written something about it already.