A couple of weeks ago, for reasons I now can’t reconstruct, I found myself in an online rabbithole learning about natto, a Japanese dish of fermented soybeans I’d never had and which I surmised many internet users were making sound a lot stranger and both more and less interesting than it actually is. Broadly, I read several sorts of things about it. The first sort, seemingly written by robots or real humans attempting to write like robots (and generally succeeding), lauded it for its unique concentrations of various nutrients, identified it as a superfood, and credited long Japanese lifespans to it, sometimes intimating that Japanese people do little other than eat it. The second sort was seemingly written by Westerners mainly interested in congratulating themselves for having discovered and consumed an exotic and/or offensive food; the ones who enjoyed it generally called it sticky and compared it to a funky cheese, while the ones who didn’t called it slimy and compared it to funky socks. The third sort was written by people familiar with Japan—mainly, though not entirely, Japanese people—explaining that some people like natto a lot and eat it for breakfast every day, that some people don’t like it at all, and that there are significant differences among types of natto, though mostly they don’t signify much; in all, they came off something like I imagine I might if I found myself explaining cream cheese to legitimately curious foreigners1. After I watched this video about a New York natto manufacturer, which I highly recommend on the grounds that it’s cool, I decided I had to try some. This sent me on a quest to Essene Market, an old-school health food store, which didn’t have any from the New York brand but did have some convenient single-serve packages from a Vermont brand.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I had my newly-acquired natto with canned fish. Before we get to that, though—and we will, for anyone currently on the verge of rage-closing this newsletter before emailing me to admonish me to stick to fish—let’s look inside one of those packages of natto.
Here it is straight from the refrigerator; as you’ll note, it basically looks like soybeans that have been in the refrigerator. This brand didn’t come with little packets of soy sauce and mustard, which to my understanding natto usually does in Japan, but this is a fish newsletter, not a place to litigate questions of authenticity in a performatively anguished way, so I shrugged, figuring that buying Vermont natto in Philadelphia was not in any event going to lead to an authentic experience like that had by some dude buying food in styrofoam in a Tokyo 7-11, and dumped it in a bowl.
This was a necessary prerequisite for what everyone I’d encountered in my online rabbithole who seemed worth paying attention to agreed was, if not necessary, certainly something to try, and perhaps the crucial next step: stirring the stuff vigorously. I lost count but surely got up over a couple of hundred stirs, resulting in this:
The goop there is the result, to my understanding, of whipping air into the bacterial film coating the soybeans, which creates a foamy and sticky substance that is tremendously fun to play with, kind of like a thinner version of the slime kids make with Elmer’s glue. (If you have any kids younger than 6 or so around, they’d probably like it.) It also, at least in my case, with this one brand—I’m not going to speak to natto more generally since I have very little experience with it—activated a pungent funk, which was about as strong as, and quite akin to, a reasonably funky cheese. Whether that sounds good or not is a matter of taste; I was nonplussed, while an associate whose tastes run more toward the mild and the bland than mine do found it quite strong and not especially pleasant, if not offensive.
I plated the natto on top of a cup of rice with quick-pickled red cabbage, scallions, and sesame seeds, along with a can of Cole’s smoked rainbow trout in olive oil. Readers interested in trout might want to read the last edition of this newsletter; the Cole’s was excellent, not quite as good as the JOSE brand I’ve previously raved about but, at about half the cost, a far better value, firm and moist and flaky with a vibrant skin and just a hint of smokiness.
It was an ideal complement to the natto, partly because while it’s nowhere near so slimy as it looks, it does benefit from something a bit more firm (the red cabbage was a good choice for this reason; kimchi would also work) and partly because the mild smokiness paired perfectly with the overwhelming flavor of the natto, which was … coffee! I haven’t had coffee in five years because I don’t like it, but loved it here.
The next day, I decided to have basically the same lunch, with steamed broccoli instead of cabbage (it was perfectly fine but in the future I’ll stick to vegetables with more snap to them), soy sauce and chili sauce in the natto (recommended), and Matíz wild-caught mackerel in extra virgin olive oil. This turned out to be a great choice. The mackerel was slightly firmer than the trout, and also slightly more strongly flavored, which worked; it was also more visually interesting, because while it appears to be taupe, when the fillets are cut open they’re a pleasing pinkish red, like something that just came off the grill.
Cole and Matíz are excellent brands, widely available, affordable enough to be more an indulgence than a luxury, and of comparable quality to cans twice the price. (The cans mentioned here absolutely pass the “Would these be good on crackers with hot sauce?” test, which is probably the most important one of all.) They’re always recommended, and having had it twice now, I’d certainly recommend natto as well. While I don’t like the concept of superfood (it’s redolent of grifting and unhealthy obsession; unless a doctor says otherwise it seems best to me to just eat a wide variety of whole foods), it really does have a lot of health benefits2, and that aside, it's not quite like anything else I've ever had. I can see where "Foamy beans with powerful overtones of coffee and the pungency of a good cheese" might not be appealing, or might strike someone as something only be tried as a stunt, but if you subscribe to a canned-seafood newsletter I don't think it will be all that far out there for you, and you just might like it a lot.
“It’s pretty ubiquitous, yeah … Some people eat it every day … I don’t know, you get it in little tubs at the store … I wouldn’t exactly say it’s regional, but it’s sort of a Northeast thing … Probably avoid the kind with fruit in it … Yes, you usually do have it on ‘a preparation of wheat that’s been boiled then baked,’ but there are other ways to have it … I don’t think anyone really cares what you do with it, though I don’t know that I’d eat it with a spoon out of the package,” etc.
Aside from the general virtues of fermented foods and beans and foods with lots of protein, calcium, and iron, natto has some specific ones: Nattokinase, an enzyme in the gloop on the beans, seems to be pretty good stuff (you can go into a rabbithole yourself if you want to), and natto is as far as I can tell by far the best source of vitamin K2. I don’t particularly stress about my consumption of these nutrients but if they’re in a food I otherwise like, great.