Where to eat natto?

Ippuku is an izakaya in downtown Berkeley that has quickly garnered a reputation for offering good Japanese food that is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere in the Bay Area: grilled mochi with braised pork belly and spicy turnip greens, for example, or chicken skewers composed of esoteric cuts (like knee cartilage), served anywhere from rare to raw. They have many standard yakitori dishes, which are quite good, but the menu seems at its best in the realm of the unexpected.

So it’s probably not surprising that they serve our natto, and that they prepare it like nowhere else: roasted over a hot fire, wrapped in a crispy purse of abura-age. (Abura-age is thinly sliced tofu, deep-fried twice to create air pockets that allow it to be stuffed with goodies like natto. Apparently it is an established fact in Japanese folklore that foxes are fond of deep-fried tofu. Who knew?)

Ippuku uses traditional bincho-tan charcoal, which gives a clean, hot, and sustained flame for easy grilling. (Which, parenthetically, is the same charcoal we use in our natto-steaming process). The chef/owner, Christian Geideman, clearly seeks out the best materia prima he can find, and has created the menu with care. The man behind the grill, Chikara, cooks with a steady hand and an eye for detail. The result is that the flavors, the textures, and the presentation of the various dishes are often striking – even surprising – to all but the most seasoned of izakaya connoisseurs.
A little bit of background: Christian grew up in the Bay Area, and he’s been cooking since he was fifteen. His culinary passions were first awakened when he began working in pan-Asian noodles houses, which eventually led him to research the finer points of udon and soba in Japan. While in Tokyo, however, things shifted. He began spending all his free time at a small yakitori, where he befriended the chef and cooked a few times; he was captivated by the allure of flame-roasted food. So he returned to the States and started saving up for his own yakitori (and izakaya); some years later, Ippuku is the result.

Like most things on the menu, the natto with abura-age is a discovery Christian made in Japan. The process is simple: natto is mixed with diced scallions and stuffed in the pouch of tofu, which is skewered on a stick and grilled briefly at high heat on all sides. The results are delicious: the natto is just warmed; creamy, rich, and offset pleasantly by the charred crispy tofu. It is appealing not only for its taste and texture, but also because (for most of us at least) it really can’t be reproduced at home.

I asked Christian how he eats natto outside of the restaurant, and says he usually goes the simplest, most traditional route: a little soy sauce or spicy mustard mixed in, some diced scallions on top, all served with a bowl of warm rice. “It’s my go-to meal,” he said.

Chikara also tends toward the simpler, more traditional preparations. Soy sauce, mustard, rice…though sometimes he’ll add a little flaked nori, or an egg yolk; “I love it. I eat it almost any way,” He said. “It’s very healthy.”

Unfortunately, though, Chikara’s wife can’t stand the stuff. “Every time I eat it, she asks me, ‘What is that smell?’ ” She often leaves the room. “Some people just don’t like it,” he said, shaking his head thoughtfully. “I can’t understand.”

I asked him if he could think of any ways to prepare natto that might appeal to a conventional Western palate; he thought for a minute, then gave the standard answer: “I don’t know; either you like it or you don’t. It’s difficult to change that.”

How to eat natto?

In Japan, conventional wisdom is that there are two kinds of people: those who love natto, and those who hate it. These feelings aren’t inherited, they aren’t regional, they don’t correlate to age or sex or any other general characteristics of the population, but still, they run very deep, and rarely change; in Japan, at least, people’s opinions about natto seem to be as inexplicable as they are unwavering. (And here is a nice visual illustration of the point, if you’re interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_dOwq8wJmk&feature=related).

In the States things seem to be a little bit different. Obviously, the vast majority of Americans have never tried natto; but even disregarding them, there still seems to be more variety than just the staunch lovers and haters in this country. There seem to be many of us who only like it in certain ways — sweet, or cooked, or mixed with vinegar to cut the stickiness, for example — and many of us who are ambivalent, unsure, intrigued, or otherwise searching for the best way to enjoy natto. Given this state of affairs, I thought I’d share some of my favorite ways to eat natto and hopefully spur some creativity in your own kitchen.

One of my favorite ways to eat natto is as part of a salad: shredded root vegetables and seaweed soaked in rice vinegar, maybe with mirin and sesame oil, allowed to marinate about half an hour. What you see here is daikon, carrot, beet, and shredded konbu (aka kelp). Wakame, dulse, and nori are nice too. Once the seaweed is rehydrated, right before eating, I stir the salad into the gooey natto matrix and spread it out on a plate, so it isn’t all bound up in one big ball. I find it light and refreshing, and more interesting than your typical seaweed salad.

If I’m eating natto for breakfast, I usually just have it over brown rice, maybe with a bit of scallion chopped up on top, which is probably the most common way to eat natto in Japan. But sometimes I don’t think of the natto until I’ve already started making something else; eggs and toast, for example. I love the runny yolks of a sunnyside-up egg, and one day I realized that some stringy natto on the toast, with the egg on top just makes the gooey-ness that much better.

If you do think of it, trying taking your natto out of the fridge the night before you eat it, and leave it uncovered at room temp. This will give the bacillus plenty of time to wake up from its dormant state, making it stickier, tastier, and more nutritious by the time it gets to your mouth.

Along similar lines, I sometimes stir a bit of honey into the natto to increase the viscosity, then eat it as-is, or on top of yogurt for extra creaminess. If you mix the honey and natto the night before, the results are even more impressive.

Just the other day I stirred a bit of peanut butter into my natto, to thicken it up, then added a few raw peanuts in as well; the saltiness and crunchiness were interesting complements, and all that fat in the PB made for a satisfying snack.

When I’m having natto as a main part of my lunch or dinner, I like to eat it with fish. It’s pretty common in Japan to eat natto with chunks of raw tuna — maguro natto, it’s called — but mercury scares me, and I can’t really afford anything but canned tuna anyway, so I started eating my natto with canned salmon instead. If you buy it with the bone and skin on, you can get quite a lot of fish for not much money, which is nice. I like to let the fish marinate in a bit of miso first (maybe with some vinegar too), then eat it alongside the natto, or all mixed in together. Simple, clean; powerfood.

And of course you can forgo the fish and just mix natto into your miso soup, which I find goes quite well with a few mushrooms like shiitakes or maitakes, along with a variety of seaweeds.

Or you can go straight for the vinegar. Vinegar does a nice job of balancing out the natto, and muting it a bit — rice vinegar doesn’t add any noticeable flavor, which is sometimes a good thing, but the ume plum vinegar definitely adds something special. A nice balsamic — thick and sweet, aged in wooden casks — somehow mellows and accentuates the natto simultaneously. It sounds impossible, but it’s true, and it’s a very nice effect.

Of course natto doesn’t need to be the center of the meal. It can make a nice accompaniment to something else — like a steak, for example. This was a revelation for me. My brother suggested trying natto with BBQ sauce a few weeks back, and I was skeptical at first, not least because I don’t know any BBQ sauce whose ingredients I really trust. But I tried it anyway, with some stuff my parents used to feed me, and I found it actually works quite well. I basted the meat lightly with the sauce, and also mixed the sauce in with the natto. When the steak was well-seared I took it off the heat and dressed it with the BBQ-natto; the flavors actually melded well together, especially as the heat from the meat made the natto into a rich glaze.

I’m thinking to do a honey-mint-natto mixture next, and have it with some lamb.

These are simple ideas, but easy, and — to my palate at least — tasty. If you’re looking for something a little more involved, an old Iron Chef episode has interesting things to try: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xVUBlL_U8. Our website also has quite a few recipes posted on it as well.

What are some of your favorite ways to eat natto? When, where, how, and why do you like it best? Please, post away…

You Need More MK7-type Vitamin K2

Many researchers from many countries have found many reasons why natto is good for your health. It is an extremely nutrient-dense food, full of enzymes, prebiotics, and probiotics; it has anti-bacterial properties, and it is also a uniquely rich source of vitamins that are difficult to find in other foods. For now we’ll focus on one of those vitamins: K2.

Vitamin K was discovered in 1929 by a Danish scientist named Henrik Dam; he isolated a nutrient that was particularly effective at helping chicken (and human) blood coagulate, and named it “K,” after the German Koagulationsvitamin. Since 1929, however, others have differentiated between two distinct types of “K” that occur naturally — K1 and K2 — as well as three types that are synthetically produced: K3, K4, and K5. K1 is available directly to humans through a variety of plant sources; it is important, but easy to get, and so studied with far less rigor than K2.

K2 has been studied extensively, so that it is now recognized to have many distinct sub-types, each named after the chemical designation for K2, menaquinone; hence, each type, 1-9, is commonly known as MK1, MK4, MK7, etc. This is important to understand because the different types of K2 come from different sources and have different effects on your health; when someone refers to vitamin K2 it is important to clarify which version of K2 they are actually talking about.

So, one final technical detail: MK4 and MK7 have both repeatedly been shown to help prevent and treat a wide variety of afflictions that plague Americans: osteoporosis, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, and arthritis. Our bodies can synthesize MK4 from K1, which is easy to get from many plants; MK7, however, is more difficult to come by, and far more effective at battling the aforementioned afflictions.

MK7 appears to be available from two major sources: either you eat animal livers, or, perhaps more appetizingly, you eat the beneficial bacteria of fermented foods such as natto. Amongst the wide spectrum of fermented foods available, natto has consistently proven to have the highest concentration of MK7-type K2 available.

Yay!

Japanese scientists have been studying natto for some time now; as “Western” food gains in popularity, and good health consequently declines (what a surprise), the national government has funded a number of studies to analyze traditional dietary habits and understand exactly why they worked so well for so long. The general idea is to codify ancestral wisdom into specific medical recommendations that will allow their population (and curious foreigners) to stay healthy.

Unfortunately for us, who are probably in need of this information even more urgently than the Japanese, the results of these studies are not always translated into English, and even when they are, their importance is not often recognized widely in this country. But there are a few European and American experts who have turned their attention toward traditional Japanese foods, and the importance of natto is now beginning to be understood outside of Japan.

So, back to MK7-type K2.  How does it work?  Essentially, your body has a difficult time knowing how to process all the calcium it receives. American medical professionals have long recognized the fact that we need vitamin D to absorb the calcium we consume — which is why it’s added to milk — but are just beginning to recognize what the Japanese have known for some time now: we need vitamin K2, and MK4 or MK7 specifically, to tell our bodies how to use all that calcium we absorb with the benefit of vitamin D.

What happens to all that calcium if it isn’t absorbed properly? Instead of going to our bones, it accumulates in arteries and tissues — leading to high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, and arthritis.

This explains why Americans have long been long been plagued by  an apparent “calcium paradox,” in that we, as a society, consume far more calcium than most other populations, but suffer from far more osteoporosis. The fact that our diets are often very low in MK7-type K2 suggests that this isn’t a paradox at all. Rather, the fact that we consume lots of calcium, suffer from osteoporosis, and simultaneously suffer from high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, and arthritis, can all be linked to deficiencies in Vitamin K2. Of course this isn’t the only reason for our national health crisis, but it does appear to be an extremely important element in the equation.

Probably the best-known study to confirm these theories was the so-called Rotterdam Study, which tracked almost 5,000 subjects over the course of 7-10 years, to analyze the importance of adequate K2 in good coronary health. The full study, published in the journal of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences, is available here: http://jn.nutrition.org/content/134/11/3100.full. Further, The Benefits of Vitamin K2, by Dr. Anthony Payne, provides a good technical overview of how K2 works in our bodies and why we need it.

In response to all this information, quite a few people have gone out to buy MK7 pills to take with their meals. As with most vitamins, however, there isn’t much evidence to suggest that our bodies can actually absorb the K2 that has been synthetically crafted, or isolated in pill-form. We can get much more MK7 when we eat it in it’s whole, natural state, in food such as natto.

This is true not only because we can absorb the MK7 more readily, but also because natto has a wide spectrum of other benefits. For example, natto has a unique enzyme — nattokinase — which helps reduce blood-clotting, thereby countering the coagulating effects of the vitamin K family, and further reducing the risk of heart disease and strokes. We’ll get into that more fully in another post. For now, though, I’ll just say that Dr. Hiroyuki Sumi is a good source for information about the nuances of nattokinase in the English language.

What is Natto?

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Natto is a traditional Japanese food, made from the careful fermentation of soybeans. After the beans have been steamed, the natto bacillus culture creates rich nutrients and unique flavors that constitute the foundation of many Japanese breakfasts, snacks, and light … Continue reading →