Where to buy natto beans
Fine Japanese Dining in Kyoto! Video Date published: 31 August Last updated: 25 January What is Natto? A brief history. Natto beans and Japanese culture. How much natto do Japanese eat? How to Eat Natto. Natto Nutrition.
Where to buy natto? How to eat natto? Types of natto beans. Natto section at the supermarket. Using natto as an ingredient in recipes. Category Other Japanese Food. Share this article. Recommended places for you See More. Other Japanese Food Ueno. Other Japanese Food Tokyo Station.
Latest Articles. See More. We went to this particular place and I had the salad and I kind of liked the natto in it. I realized, you have to mix it with something else, like put it in a salad or rice, and it tastes much better than on its own. I ended up eating natto several more times during our time in Japan in salads, maki rolls or just mixed into some rice seasoned with soy sauce.
Back home, I did some more research on where to buy natto and I realized I could get it at pretty much any Asian supermarket.
So off I went and got me some. However, in the supermarkets they sell them in little stacked Styrofoam boxes and it comes with a sauce and mustard. That meant not a lot of natto unless I bought multiple of these little boxes. So I did some more research and found out about NYrture who produce natto in New York City and sell it online or you can pick it up at a Japanese furniture store. You get one 8oz glass for 10 dollars. Better than buying these Styrofoam boxes. So I did that, bought two glasses and then thought, maybe I can try and make my own natto?
After researching on Youtube how to do it, I cooked soybeans , mixed the batch with a little of the store-bought natto as a fermentation starter and let it ferment in our closet with the heat radiator on for about 24 hours.
I had to check the temperature every hour or so. It was a laborious, tricky and kinda smelly process, but it worked! Since then, I bought an Instant Pot and made natto again with the yogurt function see for step-by-step process in the comments. It worked like a gem! Let me know if you want me to write more about how to make your own natto in an Instant Pot.
People are passionate about food as a topic these days, and I found that food was a powerful platform through which to talk to people about science. As a microbiologist and food-obsessed person, I've always been particularly interested in fermented foods and the biology and chemistry behind fermentation.
Natto is a natural leap for me because of my heritage. But then I started reading about the biology of it and about all of the medical science that's started to delve into all of its potential health benefits, and it blew me away.
Its properties, and effects on human biology—there are so many different things about natto that have pretty credible and large bodies of evidence to back them up. So how do you make natto? First, you either boil or steam soybeans. I steam them. I think all professional natto makers steam them because if you immerse any food in liquid, you're going to lose a lot of flavor and nutrients.
You also will sort of disturb the integrity of the beans if you boil them—it kind of makes the outside of the bean ragged, which won't look nice. Then, while the beans are still very hot, they're inoculated with Bacillus subtilis , which is a very common soil-dwelling bacteria. The beans have to be hot because Bacillus subtilis is a spore-forming bacteria.
Most bacteria don't do that; they simply grow and divide, and grow again and divide. They just do binary fission. But a small subset of bacteria have an alternate path to reproduce. So under conditions of stress, basically, if there isn't enough food around or something, or just if conditions are bad, they can turn on this alternate life cycle and decide to form spores.
Is that important for natto-making? It's probably why you can make this food safely. Spores are basically designed to be like seeds that can survive with no requirements. They're kind of dead, really, until they encounter favorable environments again, so they're very hardy, they're very resistant. They can last for, I don't know, decades, maybe longer, with nothing, no input.
They're also very resistant to high temperatures—like, you can boil spores for an hour, and they're completely fine. So that's why when you steam the beans, you can add this bacteria in spore form immediately, when the beans are piping-hot, under conditions where most other bacteria in the environment will not survive. When the beans are cooked, they're essentially sterile, and then you can just dump on a lot of Bacillus subtilis , which doesn't mind the heat, and just completely saturate the beans with this one bacteria.
They need a lot of moisture. At home, I used a yogurt maker: basically a little enclosed box with a water tray on the bottom, placed above a heating element. I read somewhere that natto is an odd fermented food, in that it is an alkaline ferment instead of an acidic ferment, like kimchi or dill pickles. Can you talk about that? It's just the nature of the bacteria.
Soybeans aren't alkaline, and that's all that's in the environment. This natto contains nothing but steamed soybeans and Bacillus subtilis , but the mixture goes from a neutral pH to a pH of around 9 by the end.
I don't use pH as an indicator—alkalinity is just a by-product. I suppose one could, but it's much easier to assess the fermentation visually. I'm pretty sure making the mixture alkaline has no effect on the growth rate of the bacteria. What happens after incubation? At least with my process, it goes into a refrigerator. I think it has to age for a few days before it really starts to develop the right flavor.
There's some further breakdown of proteins—everything doesn't come to a grinding halt in the fridge. There's still a very low level of bacterial activity going on, so, to some extent, there's some fermentation, but there's also just some passive chemistry that's happening, too, because the fermentation has done a lot of breaking down of the various soybean components. Once broken, the proteins release more glutamates and amino acids, and the natto develops a stronger umami taste over time.
But every producer has their own detailed methodology, and they differ in terms of exactly what temperature or what range of temperatures they use, for how long, the moisture levels, the type of bacterial strains.
There's a variety of strains that are available, and each one has slightly different characteristics. They have different impacts on the natto product, so different companies are particular about which kinds they like to use. So far, I've been sticking with one strain, but I do plan to experiment with some others.
I think, to be honest, the differences between strains are quite subtle. For example, it's said that there are strains now that produce less smelly natto.
I believe less smell goes hand in hand with the natto being somewhat less sticky. There are strains that ferment the beans faster; there are strains that are better for the very small-bean natto, as opposed to the larger-bean nattos. But the differences are not huge, I would say. In Japan, because this is such a developed industry, there are food scientists who devote all of their time to studying the effects of all these slight variations in the basic method. And actually, there's a very serious natto competition each year, where the some producers of natto all compete.
I think there are 40 judges, so it's very political; it's like a consortium event, and it takes apparently decades of training and experience for these guys to become qualified to be natto judges.
It's like the wine world, really. So there are subtle differences between the varieties that those with less experience are just in the dark about, but there are differences. Can you talk about the different varieties of natto that exist? What makes them different?
Each of the hundreds of natto producers in Japan makes a unique natto product. There's a range of soybean sizes used and differences in texture and appearance. For example, there's hikiwari natto, where the beans are all chopped up, and beyond the regular brown natto, there's green and black natto. Many Japanese pick their natto brands based on the tare , or sauce, that comes with it. In some regions, people prefer a sweeter tare; others like their tare saltier. For a tiny producer like me, providing a tare is a whole other project to take on.
In Japan, most natto companies don't even make their own tare; they source it from tare companies. What is it that gives natto its sliminess? Neba-neba is the Japanese word that refers to the uniquely sticky, slimy, gooey texture that natto is known and loved for.
Natto's stringy "special sauce" is a product of the bacterial fermentation, a biofilm produced by the bacteria to protect itself and to allow it to move around.
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