(photo by wm. christman)
The bulk of this is from my old food blog (called Two Ate (linked here if you're curious to see it...)). I was inspired to repost it here because Linda from Playing With Fire And Water started a soybeans set of postings in the past few days and she just posted a beautiful photo of sticky delicious natto.
And when she posts just a photo, the very next post is usually an extremely clever dish/concept using that ingredient. I am looking forward to what she posts next. My natto spaghetti repost starts here:
I love (LOVE!) natto. Natto is fermented soybeans...it's primarily Japanese (I think) and it's fragrant, sticky (REALLY sticky) and goes well with a bowl of hot rice, on toast, or rolled up in a maki sushi roll (natto-maki) but I like it best mixed with spaghetti. Lots of people think natto is disgusting, rotten food...ah, those who don't know....
NATTO SPAGHETTI ("natto-spa")
(If you read Japanese, you can also see a version of this recipe I wrote and submitted to Japan's cookpad.com here.)
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Ingredients:
- spaghetti
- natto (one pack per person)
- two green onions (I have also substituted very thinly sliced white onion in place of green onion. It gives a slightly stronger flavor.)
- canned tuna (in oil), broken apart into small pieces
- 1-2 TBSP soy sauce
- karashi (japanese mustard) to taste
- canned tuna oil (from tuna can above)
- nori seaweed
- 1/4-1/2 stick butter at room temp (optional)
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How:
0. Toast nori over flame (if you've got it). Cut into small strips. Or just find some small strips of nori and use those.
1. Boil water for spaghetti.
2. Thinly slice green onion.
3. Open and drain tuna, reserving oil.
4. Scrape out natto into a mixing bowl. Mix natto w/ chopsticks to avoid crushing beans. I usually mix it about 40-50 turns/times...maybe more. Mix until it becomes slightly frothy, being gentle to not mush the beans...don't worry, it'll get frothy REALLY quickly.
5. Squeeze out tsuyu (sauce) and mustard packet(s) into natto. Mix some more.
6. Add onions, 1/2 of tuna, 1 TBSP soy sauce and continue mixing natto. It will get less sticky once you add these things.
7. Taste and add tuna oil, additional soy sauce, karashi to taste if you want. Basically, season to taste.
8. Salt boiling water and cook spaghetti.
9. When spaghetti is done, heat and dry a bowl to toss spaghetti in...
10. Put half of butter in bowl followed by cooked (hot) spaghetti and the other half of butter and toss.
Or omit butter and go to step 11.
11. Pour the natto mixture onto the spaghetti and continue to toss until distributed in spaghetti.
12. Taste and adjust soy sauce if you want then plate.
13. Put shredded nori on top of spaghetti.
14. Eat!
