How to eat Japanese fermented soy beans (Nattō)

If you have Japanese friends, probably you have heard about Nattō.

It is fermented soy beans that one part of the Japanese people love so much that they cannot live without. And the other part, however, hates it. It is popular food in eastern part of Japan, but less so in the western part.

The reason of this deep divide is mainly the small of Nattō. As all the fermented foods, Nattō has a very particular and strong smell which is, if you are not used to it, a bad odour. Some say that the Chinese black beans are smelly, but there is no comparison with Nattō.

Also the non-Japanese people find this food disgusting. For foreigners, the problem is not only the smell, but also its sliminess. The Japanese people in general love slimy foods, but it is not the case for other nations. I have met only a couple of non-Japanese who said they like these fermented soy beans.

I heard that the Indonesians have something similar called "tempe", but they cook in a way that it does not smell as much as its Japanese cousin.

As I belong to the group that love Nattō, I enjoy enjoy eating it. Fortunately in Birmingham, we can find frozen Nattō in Chinese or Korean grocery stores. It costs three times more expensive than in Japan, but, I won't complain as it is probably brought frozen by air cargo (but it makes me feel guilty of carbon foot printing).

This is a packet of Nattō. I paid £1.40.



This packet contains 4 small containers of Nattō, as you see below. In a container, there are also a small packet of soy sauce based sauce and another of mustard.




I eat Nattō with raw egg. I put also some Japanese seven flavour chili. The white thing beneath is steamed rice.



And mix mix mix. Then I get this.



It is almost soupy because I did not put much rice, but usually people put more rice. The mixture of Nattō odour and raw egg smell is almost obscene. It is sooooo good.

I would not recommend this to anybody, as it is not for feint hearted, but if you happen to be lover of smelly food, this is the one for you. ha ha ha.


You can always find it in H-mart in Selly Oak, and sometimes also in Day-In in Arcadian Centre. This page will help you to find it, too.

http://www.wonderbirmingham.co.uk/birmingham/japanesefood_en.html

Khazana (Vegetarian Indian Buffet)

9 May 2007 Dim and I went to this Indian-Chinese Vegetarian Buffet restaurant in Handsworth area.

This is interior. It made us forget to be in Handsworth (for those who doesn't know Birmingham, Handsworth is not a particularly good area where gun crimes and even a riot happened recently).

We went for the weekend buffet for £9.99/head. For this price we could have about 30 kinds of starters, main courses, soups and sweets. There was a plenty to choose from.

There was also a la carte menu, but it seemed a bit over priced.

This is my starter.


There were good things and bad things. Chapatti and square gram flour cake were good, but the rest were so and so. The orange rice was rather insipid and cold. Dhosa was ok, but I think I don't like Dhosa from the start.

Below is Dim's dish. The noodles at the centre of dish were particularly disgusting: they tasted as if they were burnt even if they were not. Also the white stuff was very strang: something savoury with sweet yogurt with it.



This is my main dish. Different from the starters, there two curries were quite nice: one is muttar panir and the other was curry with sticky potato. Unfortunately rice was bit dry and devoid of fragrance. I would have faired better with chapatti.



But the best things I ate here were these soups: left is mixed beans soup and right is sambar. They both very spicy and flavoursome.


For desserts there were carrot halwa and this mango soup, which was soothing and enjoyable.

In total, it was interesting experience, but not entirely positive. There were very nice things, but also some less than average food. I might want to return, but I would choose more carefully what I will eat.

For those who interested, you can find all the necessary information on their website.