Natto Making Experiment

This post is *not* a tutorial. I just want to document my first attempt at natto making. Making natto was an adventure and I made many mistakes along the way.

I have wanted to try making natto since I watched Emmy do it on her YouTube channel.

I started by soaking the soy beans for 24 hours. I heard that this small foam that develops on the water surface is an indicator that the beans have soaked long enough.

I drained the beans.

I cooked them in my electric pressure cooker for 25 minutes under pressure.

I put the hot soy beans into a couple ceramic vessels that I had sanitized with bleach. 

This is when I started to make mistakes. I realized that every example online only used shallow dishes to ferment natto. I had counted on using a deep container to ferment a whole bunch at one time. I had to alter my plans and use only a shallow layer of beans in my containers.

Boy, did I have a lot of extra soy beans!

To inoculate my soy beans with the right culture I put a chunk of frozen commercially prepared natto in the center of the hot beans.

After a few minutes it was totally thawed and I stirred it around thoroughly to get culture on all the beans.

I used a piece of plastic from an old cereal bag, which I had also sanitized, to seal in the moisture. I poked a few holes for breathing and left my thermometer through one of the holes to monitor the temperature.

Here I ran into another problem. I had counted on using the electric pressure cooker to keep my fermenting beans at the right temperature just like the lady in the video had done. The problem is that my electric pressure cooker is not an Insta-pot brand and it does not have a yogurt setting, which had not noticed until I was ready to ferment my beans.

After ample googling and blog reading I came to the conclusion that I would try my crockpot on the keep warm setting. I believe that the keep warm setting is still too hot. (Natto ferments at 90°-113° F.) I planned to turn it on for a while and then turn it off for a little bit and so on and so forth through the night. 

I fell asleep and left it on for too long, or so I thought. And then it got too cold one time, or so I thought.

I wasn't too optimistic when the fermentation time was over. I checked to see if the beans had the strings to prove that they had turned into natto.

We had strings! Somehow it had worked!

We eat our natto on top of a serving of rice with sardines or boiled eggs. 

I like to garnish with pickled onions or peppers or green onions. And always a sprinkle of soy sauce.

I eat my bites on little pieces of nori when we have some. Very tasty and very nutritious.