There are two times in my life when I have encountered something so gross that I literally gagged.
The first time was back in Jr. High while I was babysitting. I had to change the diaper of a little girl who was very sick. Let's not go into that any further. You don't want to know.
One of the most popular questions the Japanese ask me is, "have you ever eaten natto?", usually accompanied by a smirk. This evening I tried the infamous natto for the first time. Natto is fermented bean crap, the taste and smell of which has been compared to "battery acid." Tonight my Japanese friends insisted that I try it before I leave Japan. They stirred up a little bowl of beans in some sort of brownish-yellow slime. So I took a small cluster that looked like baked beans but smelled like rotten trash. No exaggeration. In a stunning act of courage I ate them, long strings of gooey stuff draping from my mouth to my chopsticks.
And that marks the second time in my life that I have gagged.
I shoved the bowl of natto and my chopsticks into the hands of my friends and ran blindly towards the sink, firstly for a gulp of water and secondly just in case I was about to see those beans again.
"Wow, is it really that bad?" My friends asked.
"It's terrible!!" I exclaimed, and after several glasses of water, soon I was curled up on the couch, clutching a little bowl of vanilla ice cream.
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3 comments:
Hey, I tried it when Shintaro had some. I thought it tasted like a bean in a sticky rotten garbage turpentine sauce. Not bad, but I didn't ask for seconds.
Wow, what a wonderful laste tast of Japan. And I was going to serve beans when you got home....
Natto is pretty ickypoo when you try it for the first time. Especially because it really looks like someone just blew their nose right into the beans while pouring essence of athletes feet into it to ad that god awful smell! I prefer Kuromame Natto, it's much sweeter and uses wasabi and generally tastes better.
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