How to make Natto or Slima beans

Some natto made from large soy beans.

What a commercial package of natto beans looks like

To make the Natto in the first pic, I soaked a pound of large soy beans for 24 hours, and then pressure cooked them, for 20 minutes, 20 minutes was probably a little long the beans were a little mushy.

Soy beans in the pressure cooker.

While the beans were cooling, I boiled two shot glasses in some water and pulled them out of the boiling water, with some water in them. To the water in the shot glasses I added a pinch of salt and about an 1/8 of a teaspoon of raw sugar to the hot water. Once the water had cooled to about 120F I added a teaspoon of natto from the commercial natto to each shot glass.

The beans hadn't cooled enough so I put them in two 9 inch square trays and let them cool some more, till they were down to about 100F, then I added the one of the shot glasses each to the trays of cooled beans. Covered the trays with foil loosely, and sat them in a warm place. The temp varies from 75F to about 95F for 24 hours.
These temps that they incubated at were somewhat lower than is what is called for in the recipes I found, but it worked.

When they're done they look like this,

The white bloom is caused by amino acids that crystallize? on the outside of the bean, when you stir the them the sliminess is caused by long chain polysaccharides the bacteria, Bacillus subtilis makes.

I made some Lima bean natto the same way, it didn't turn out sticky they way the soy beans did.

But they were sticky enough to hold together even though they didn't form the sticky slimy stringy thread that the soy beans did when stirred.

I also made some from lentils, and these were not sticky either, but the smell was fantastic. To me the soy bean natto has a smell like mildly roasted grain or coffee. The Lentil natto batch I made had a very penetrating, an almost skunky, but in a good way, coffee smell.

I pretty much followed the recipe from this page,
http://www.gaia21.net/natto/making.htm

This post, by Hipster inspired me to get off my ass and try making this.

Another post by Hipster.

Natto can be bought at asian stores, in the frozen section it comes in a little Styrofoam container. The packages contain 40 to 50 gram servings of natto with soy sauce and mustard on the side.

Some more Natto stuff.

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