Scientists just made a jellyfish potato chip

The process can’t really be automated. Chaung tells me it’s like cooking a good steak, the way every cut of meat has its own cooking time depending on the thickness, and has to be watched under an expert eye. Some batches of jellyfish will only need five days, some will need as long as ten, and it’s hard to know in advance. You just have to watch, and wait. Chaung says he’s tried everything over the years to speed up the process, tweaking salt and alum levels without success.

But a new time-saving method may be on the horizon. A team of researchers from the University of Southern Denmark found that submerging moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) in a solution of 96 percent ethanol sped up preparation rapidly. Compared to salt/alum preparation over the course of a 40-day period, they found that the jellyfish submerged in ethanol lost so much mass they turned into a paper-thin wafer—almost like a potato chip. That alone is noteworthy, the researchers suggest; the novel method, one that could give rise to a new generation of aquatic snacks.

When they tried dramatically cutting short the amount of processing time, they found encouraging results. Moon jellies left in chilled ethanol for two to three days, then left overnight at room temperature, had the same desirable texture as the same species left in salt and alum for twenty days, and dried over the course of two weeks. That’s a time savings of almost 90 percent.

If it’s true this approach can be used on a commercial scale, it could be good news for people who rely on jellyfish as a food source—and the people who process them for a living. Chaung hadn’t heard about the study, but he told me that the time difference would help him move inventory in and out more quickly, improving cash flow. It might enable the jellyfish to enjoy some popularity outside Southeast Asia. Some fisheries in the southeastern United States have already entered the industry looking for new profit sources, and surely more would join them if the job was easier. There might be sustainability benefits, too: as fish stocks decline worldwide, jellyfish are thriving, to the point that it’s become a concern for ecologists and tourism boards alike.

That’s not to say a booming jellyfish industry would be all good, necessarily. It could harm the sea animals that rely on them for food, and all that corn-based ethanol could create the same land use dilemmas we see elsewhere in animal agriculture. We’ll have to work through the implications later, but the study makes one thing clear: we’re one step closer to jellyfish preparation being the work not of a master, but of a machine.