I only put my natto in the dehydrator for 15 hours. When I looked at it this morning it looked like raisins. I am eating some right now and it's the weirdest food I ever ate. It even reminds me of raisins while eating it except they stick to my teeth a lot more and aren't sweet. Not sure whether I should keep drying them or just eat them like this...

I went back to carnivore and stopped eating natto for several days in a row because I sort of got tired of it and I woke up with terrible leg cramps yesterday. Been eating natto again. I think just a bowl a day is plenty but I remember now that I haven't gotten leg cramps since I started eating it. Not even once. Not sure why.

My guess would be that your pancreas is not producing enough lipase to digest the fat. This could either be because your pancreas is not used to it or that it is working slow. Probably a combination of both. Perhaps eating raw animal pancreas would fix that, though it is also high in fat. Pancreas goes by the name of belly sweetbreads. My butcher has neck sweetbreads which are the thymus gland. They are one of my favorite raw organ meats, though I consume them by making organ meat smoothies which is frowned upon by many in this forum. I say any way you can get them down...

I used to eat a lot of clay. Don't know why I stopped. Maybe I shouldn't have. The clay should say it is edible and also be calcium bentonite, not sodium bentonite which made me sick when I  tried it. Both kinds work exceptionally well for insect bites. My clay has been hydrating for years. I just add clay and water to it when it gets low or too thick. Could have a lot of microbes growing in it. You don't need to hydrate it that long. A couple of days will help greatly. If you don't and consume a lot of it there is a danger of it sucking up too much water in your gut and creating a blockage. Clay can absorb up to 50 times it's weight in water. At one time I was eating it like gravy, dipping raw meat in it. I guess I just ate too much and got tired of it. I also think I was eating so much that it was preventing my body from absorbing nutrients. Maybe I just over did it and ate too much of a good thing!

I probably haven't; but I really feel like I've perfected the art of making natto. Sterility and ventilation are two opposing forces that must be dealt with. I've made a few batches without ventilation but I discovered the strong coffee like nutty taste is virtually gone when you do this. The more ventilation  the stronger the nutty, coffee like flavor it develops but this also increases the risk of natto failure due to contamination. You can reduce the risk of contamination by inoculating with more spores or more fresh natto and also by adding layers of sterility and redundancy. When I first started I covered my natto directly with a sterilized towel and this worked if I used an entire tray of natto to inoculate but not so good using spores or less natto. Instead of the towel I started using 2 layers of plastic wrap, punctured hundreds of times with a tooth pick. One laying directly on the natto and another on top of the bowl. I just make sure not to let the tooth pick come in contact with the natto. The plastic wrap is virtually sterilized when it comes from the factory. I just pull past the first layer that's been exposed to air making sure it never comes in contact with the culturing natto. I still use a towel but it suspended way above the beans and serves as a spacer for ventilation purposes. I also spray everything with a 50/50 mixture of bleach water from a spray bottle and wipe it off with a clean paper towel. Much like washing windows. I do this for everything, even the inside of the pressure cooker and everything that goes in it, despite it's going to be sterilized by the heat of the pressure cooker anyway.  Aging the natto greatly improves the taste. I make sure to bleach spray and wipe the tupperware that the finished natto is  going into as well, adhering to my double redundancy principal. I do my best not to breath on the natto while I'm inoculating it but I refuse to wear a mask. You gotta draw the line somewhere! Almost forgot. I no longer add any honey, molasses or anything to boost the spores. I think this was messing up my natto and increasing the chances of contamination. I thought maybe this helped give it more of the coffee like taste that is so greatly sought after or increase the stringiness but I was wrong. It's best to just keep it simple. I also found that filling the water all the way up, touching the bottom of the steamer makes the beans more tender but don't go too much above or you'll be boiling the beans which takes the skins off and makes a mess. One last tip. Don't get greedy and try and make too much at one time. An inch deep layer of beans will culture up just fine but if you go too much beyond that bottom layers wont get enough ventilation.

Suspicious that it doesn't say what the drug is...

As someone who only eats beef and fish raw or undercooked I'll refrain from judgment. There are both good and bad parasites. Getting bad parasites seems to come from exterminating the good ones. Usually from antibiotics. I know little or nothing about tapeworms though. Were some movie stars in the news a while back from trying tape worms to loose weight or was that some other parasite?

OK. So I thought I had become an expert at making natto but apparently it was beginners luck. Even the oriental grocery store knows little about natto. When I bought it for the 2nd time the same boxes were sitting in the refrigerator. The expiration date was several months from now. The problem was the date was for keeping the natto frozen and it was being sold as refrigerated. By the time I got my 2nd batch home it was already too spoiled for making natto but I've learned a few tips since then:

One thing I learned (I will post links at the end) is that the spores I ordered can tolerate very high temperatures and can even survive being boiled for up to an hour. Though to be safe you should not exceed 175 degrees F. when inoculating. I reasoned that the opposite was true and  that the naked spores could be killed instantly as opposed to being protected by being in the beans. Nothing could be further from the truth and one website went so far as to say the spores should be shocked by inoculating while the natto is steaming hot, much like the way some seeds proliferate after a forest fire. No wonder my natto from spores failed!

I was also worried that maybe my natto had failed because of the honey. Honey is sterile and I thought maybe the honey had steralized them. Though neither of the links I am about to post recommend using honey they do recommend using salt for minerals and sugar or molasses to help give the spores a head start in addition to the heat shock treatment.

I also read that Bacillus subtilis, the strain of bacteria that produces natto is somewhat essential to the human gut and that it is very rare, only found in a few cheeses and very few other foods. Though most bacteria are killed by stomach acid, Bacillus subtilis spores survive the journey surprisingly well and once introduced proliferate in the small intestine.

Also natto is one of the few fermented foods that is alkaline, a PH of 9.0 and virtually every other fermented food is acid.

For more information kindly read the links below:

https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/07/obsessed-ann-yonetani-natto-nyrture.html

http://www.tahoescience.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/LTFedEvent-2008-natto-making.pdf

Thanks for putting up with my natto obsession.

surfsteve.

If any of you guys are looking for something (cooked,) quick, easy and cheap (If you're willing to buy in bulk) to make that is nutritious I highly suggest miso soup!

I can make a cup of semi authentic miso soup just as fast as anyone can make a ramin noodle or cup-o-soup!

While a cup of water is coming to a boil I throw a large pinch of wakame seaweed, small hand full of dried tuna flakes, a teaspoon of kelp poweder and squeeze an ounce of miso as if it were tooth paste into a cup. It takes me well under a minute to do this and I have to wait another minute or two for the water to come to a boil.

$11 for a kilogram of miso, enough to make 60 cups.

$35 for a kilogram of wakame seaweed, enough to make 500 cups.

$20 for a pound of dried tuna flakes, enough to make 200 cups

and $13 for kelp powder, enough to make 250 cups. All quantities are conservative estimates and the cups I make are huge! Prices are all obtainable from Amazon and include USA delivery.

If you loved Ramin noodles but don't eat them anymore because they are so unhealthy you will most likely be interested in making miso soup.

They didhn't have the same cheap brand of natto to use as starter at the oriental grocery store yesterday but the brand they had worked just like before.

I had high hopes for using dry natto or the spores. Too bad they didn't work.

How am I going to make natto during the zombie apocalypse or if Trump doesn't get reelected in 2020?

As insurance I ordered some dry natto spores and made a batch of natto as usual. After 8 hours I stirred the natto and I had zero cultivation so I added some powdered natto into the batch and checked it again this morning. I still have zero cultivation even after 16 hours. I added some more powdered spores but I'm not expecting natto to cultivate. What a waste! Both the spores and powdered natto have failed to produce natto. I'm headed to the oriental grocery store to buy more fresh natto. This seems to be the only source that works. I'm buying two packages and putting one in the freezer for emergency. Never tried making natto from frozen natto but apparently it works.

Since I started eating natto my health has gone up several notches.

It's very disappointing not to be able to make natto from either of the dry sources because natto would be a really good food to make in a SHTF situation. I think I'm going to order a bag from the same source as when I first tried dried natto. The new stuff doesn't even taste like natto, just plain old dried and powdered soy beans. I wonder though why the spores didn't work. Going to give it another 8 hours and if it doesn't work by the time this new batch of beans are done soaking, throw away the whole mess. My dogs are begging for natto but I'm eating it all myself till I can grow enough for them!

Who knew?

To conclude: I'm eating a 3rd bowl of natto this morning. (1st and 3rd bowl from batch 2 and 2nd bowl from batch 1.) I believe the more it's cultured, the stronger the cheesy cocoa taste it develops. Even after only 12 hours of culturing it's pretty stringy and doesn't get much stringier after 30 hours, I think it's pretty much the taste that changes. My first batch I only had a tiny bit of starter natto left but I used a huge tablespoon from that batch to make the 2nd one, that plus the honey plus the additional culture time made the taste a lot stronger.

I ate a huge bowl of the soybean natto I made yesterday and I can really feel the difference. I can still taste it this morning and I feel an almost high from it. It would be interesting to find out the vitamin content of natto made from different types of beans. The soybean natto is the mildest tasting and all the extra honey really fed the microbes and got them going quickly. About halfway through the fermentation process I stir the beans and added more water to them. The last batch was noticeably more fermented than any previous batches. To the point where it was half beans and half stringy ferment which is sort of like gravy. OK maybe not sort of but enough to remind me of it.

I'm adding a monster sized tablespoon of honey to my next batch and planning on fermenting it for 30 hours. I'm also out of store bought natto so I'm inoculating it with the natto I made from the previous batch. I wonder if it will reduce the quality the way it does when you do it with yogurt. It seemed with yogurt that after 3 or 4 generations the quality was noticeably worse.