About Natto
When I was a little girl, I loved watching the Ghostbusters and the one character that I remember most is Slimer. He’s this green little slimey ghost that oozes and leaves trails of green goo everywhere he went. Now, I was fascinated by the goo even though I can safely say that I was also disgusted by it - fascination and disgust can bring a very interesting combo of feelings in a person.
I find that that combo of mixed feeling came in handy when I was given Nattō in a Japanese restaurant - a type of preserved soy beans. It’s not green but the texture of the slime reminded me of Slimer’s trail goo. I was fascinated as I played with it with my chopsticks - swirled it around and poked at it - and in all those times, it just gets slimier and slimier till I could bear it no more. I had to taste it.
Now why would I want to taste something that smells like funk and looks like the filth left behind by a fictional cartoon character? I don’t know. I was mortally digusted but I wanted to also try.
And so I did.
I didn’t vomit but I didn’t like it all that much either. It’s slimey inside your mouth but it has a little nutty taste with the perfume of sewers to round up the taste. If you drink alfalfa juice, you’ll find it tastes almost the same - almost. But the natto has a slight sourness to it…let’s just put it this way, natto tastes like a combination of alfalfa juice, peanuts and blue cheese.
I ate it with my rice and with lots of soy sauce - it didn’t taste half as bad.
It appears that Nattō is a very nutritious food. It’s got a very high protein content and vegetarians would benefit from it greatly. Nattō is most commonly eaten at breakfast to accompany rice, possibly with some other ingredients, for example soy sauce, tsuyu broth, mustard, scallions, grated daikon, okra, or a raw quail egg. In Hokkaidō and northern Tohoku region, some people dust nattō with sugar. Nattō is also commonly used in other foods, such as nattō sushi, nattō toast, in miso soup, salad, as an ingredient in okonomiyaki, or even with spaghetti or as fried nattō. A dried form of nattō, having little odor or sliminess, can be eaten as a nutritious snack. There is even nattō ice cream.
I shuddered to think about natto ice cream. Anyway, I think it would be find for savory food but not for the sweet…it would just be weird. Imagine have fried chicken flavored ice cream. Along those lines yea.
But would i eat natto again? Sure. I didn’t hate it and would certainly love to try it with other ingredients. I am thinking Nattō with…I don’t know any other way of eating except with rice really. Oh well.
Source: Wikipedia
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