Ladies and gentleman, we’ve had our breakthrough. I have found a way to prepare natto which is so singularly edible that I would gladly consume it on a daily basis.
Now the old staple of natto, soy, mustard was going pretty well. It was never exactly “oh boy, natto!” but it was certainly palatable. I could have happily eaten it for the remainder of the project, and then never maybe eaten it every now and then just to remember the good old days. But in the spirit of adventure I felt I had to keep trying new, potentially disgusting, ways of making it every now and then. And it was during such a flight of madness that the greatest natto preparation ever was produce.
So there I was, watching my World Cup in my boxers because it’s just shy of 90 degrees in the middle of the night, watching Germany lose to Serbia (who saw that coming…) when I start to get kind of hungry.
A quick examination of my situation and surroundings produced the following pieces of information:
- I hadn’t eaten my natto for the day
- There was a bottle of Tabasco sauce within arm’s reach
- I wasn’t quite crazy enough to actually combine the two, though I did seriously consider it
But it got me thinking. Something spicy might actually go well with the strong musky natto punch. In fact if that spice came from something that was unto itself pretty flavorful and healthy, then I would have one potent package on my hands. It hung there, at the edge of my consciousness as Germany finished losing (this World Cup is totally broken…), and then it hit me like a bolt of lighting, or a 3rd grader dick punch (yeah, they do that):
Natto Kimchi
And let me be the first to tell you, this stuff is delicious. The kimchi adds a really nice crunch from the cabbage, plus all that spicy pepper and garlic, so that the flavor of natto is actually pushed back to a supporting role, where it is almost tasty. Almost. But the textures all work together so well, and the slime even seems less vile.
I think…I think we’ve done something great here today.
Other Notables for the Week
I finally got around to trying the 糸の力 (Ito no Chikara, translates to something like “The Power of the Threads”) brand of natto. It’s threads were, as the following photos do indeed suggest, quite powerful:
Woo, look at it go!
I think it has something to do with the smaller bean size. More contact with other beans producing just gushing torrents of slime, which is every bit as tasty as you’d imagine. No really, it’s pretty good.
But just for good measure, I had to see what happened when I combined the power of kimchi, with the power of Ito No Chikara. The results were…
sticky.