How to Make Natto Taste Good using Food Bastardization

So you bought some natto and you figured, well, it’s digusting! How can we possibly make natto taste good, and do so quickly, easily, and without adding anything that’s unhealthy? I found a quick way to do it and want to share it with you. After a year eating natto daily for health improvement reasons, I came up with a great way to remove the natto odor and make it more pallatable to European and American tastes, which basically means: make it sweet and make it smell good.

What is Food Bastardization

What exactly is food bastardization? It’s the practice of taking two or more items and joining them, in the hope that the new combination will eliminate the negatives and bring out combined positives. As such, the process is similar to DNA recombination. You take two individuals and the combination of the two, plus a small amount of mutation, forms a brand new individual.
What are the risks? Well, as it is with nature, sometimes when combining two things, the negative aspects aren’t eliminated. In fact, the positives may disappear entirely and the negative attributes might combine and multiply in strength. This effect is often seen in human offspring.

Natto Bastardization

The need to bastardize natto is obvious when you open a pack of natto for the first time. Even Japanese people wish they had a bastardized version of natto. I guess that’s why they ship the natto with various ‘flavorings’ and ‘sauces’, which contain hundreds of chemicals. The reason is simple: it’s too healthy, hence the chemicals, and its smell and taste are disgusting. So the idea was born that we need to mate this Japanese jewel with a tropical counterpart, similar to how it’s done in certain movie industries.
But why take advice from a Greek when natto is Japanese? I urge you to keep an open mind. The truth always hides where you don’t expect it. Fun example, one day I had this old guy over to sign up for life insurance. What a stupid idea you might think, and it was 😉 So seeing our daughter he told me with pity, and with a little bragging, that he has five sons. So I asked him, what happened after #5? Did the cash run out ;-)? So he told me that an old man once told him “the secret” to having boys, and he literally jumped at the opportunity. “The secret” so he told me is deep penetration. So, needless to say, we didn’t buy life insurance from this fellow; however, after putting his idea into action, we now have 11 sons, Biff and Bam-bam, and 9 more that my wife doesn’t know about. So don’t be so quick to judge where ideas come from!

Serving Suggestion

No, it doesn’t have to look like sticky goat poop. You could actually make it look interesting, like this:

The recipe for a good tasting natto snack

You need:

1. organic natto, one pack about 40-50 grams
2. cinnamon
3. cloves
4. one banana

What you see below is the ‘ready-to-eat’ plate of natto desert; however, I should have taken a more presentable picture of the natto (like the one above) before mixing it up:

To make it look better when serving it, don’t mix it up. Mash the banana and place natto over it. Then sprinkle the spices over it. This also works great with ice cream! Again, it tastes good and much better than it looks!

Here’s a close up, again it’s not the ‘ready to serve’ look, it’s the ‘ready to eat’ look:

Note that the natto sliminess persists; however, it tastes very good because of the banana’s sweetness covers all natto odors and flavors. The Christmas-like spices cinnamon and cloves are not only very healthy for you, they also taste very good and cover up any remaining natto odors.

Why bother eating natto? Why is it healthy?

The reason why I eat natto as a ‘pre-coffee’ snack, is that one portion (40 grams or so) contains 500 μg of Vitamin K2 MK7, which is a very high dose of that particular K vitamin. Vitamin K2 is very hard to obtain from diet alone in therapheutic doses. MK7 is a critical vitamin that helps the vascular system and recent studies indicate that vitamin K2 MK7 helps decalcify the coronary arteries and other arteries in the body. The body can convert MK7 to other vitamin K forms; hence, if you provide type of this vitamin K, the body can convert it to other forms of vitamin K as needed.

In addition, one portion of natto contains about 1,500 FU of nattokinase. This enzyme is unique to natto and prevents blood clotting. It is believed that eating natto regularly several times a week may reduce the risk of heart disease, heart attacks and strokes. It was observed in many Japanese studies that in those populations that ate natto daily, the prevalence of heart disease is much lower. Today we are beginning to realize that vitamin K2 MK7 and nattokinase are likely the source of this health benefit.

Through my own blood pressure experiments, I found that natto does indeed lower blood pressure at least about 5 points when consumed daily.