JEDDAH, 24 November 2004 — If you find coconut milk extraction difficult, just be patient because a device that could make this exercise a child’s play would hit the market soon.
Called Pigata for piga (squeeze) and gata (coconut milk), the device had already passed the test at the Philippine Patent Office and is now being “torture-tested” by some Filipinos in Jeddah, where its maker is working.
“Once we’ve sure all possible defects are found and corrected, we’ll start mass-producing it,” said Rosendo “Rolly” Cayabyab, a civil engineer who works as project supervisor at Saudi ABV and a tinkerer during his free time.
Cayabyab said he started working on his project when he saw his wife struggling to extract coconut milk by hand during one of his vacations in the Philippines.
“I asked my wife if there was any device she could buy from the market that can make her work easy. She told me there was none. When I came back to Jeddah, I inquired from friends, including other expats, and nobody knew of such a device.
“I searched in supermarkets, to no avail. This drove me to think of inventing one,” Cayabyab told Arab News in an interview.
Cayabyab’s drive was all the more fired up when he saw a Japanese TV cooking show with the host extracting coconut milk by hand.
If Japan — a technologically advanced country — is still doing it by hand, he thought, then there is a need to make such a device.
b>Multipurpose
Despite its simple design, Pigata can effectively extract not just coconut milk but also juice from orange or lemon.
It is a set of dippers or cylinders, made of aluminum alloy, which can be easily engaged into each other to compress coconut flesh and extract coconut milk. The dippers come with handles the user pulls inwardly (like pruning shears) to create compression.
The secret is the positioning of the groove and pins in relation to the cylinders. Of course, the calculations are Cayabyab’s trade secret.
Cayabyab visited the Philippine Patents Office in Manila’s financial district of Makati last April to get his work patented.
While convincing the patent officer was easy, the hard part was the production of the prototype.
He said the first machinist he approached did a poor job despite asking and getting a hefty amount of 30,000 pesos. Not only was the finished product substandard, it was not manufactured according to specifications.
Unfazed, Cayabyab went to another machinist, who eventually made the correct prototype.
Cayabyab took the prototype to Saudi Arabia and is now letting his co-workers use it to test its durability.
Among those who had tried Pigata is Angel Mandayoc.
“It is indeed very user-friendly. We have used it in all our cooking, mainly menus that need coconut milk like ginataan, laing, or ginataang isda,” he said.
Jun Escalante, another engineer, said he was not really surprised when Cayabyab showed him his work.
“I saw in him a natural talent in fixing things ... I think Pigata will be a by-word among housewives, most likely those who have a penchant for using coconut milk in their cooking, because it will make their task easy,” Escalante said.