Kinema is a sticky, savoury fermented soybean food from the eastern Himalayas. Cooked soybeans are split, often mixed with a little
wood ash, and left warm in a leaf-lined basket for one to three days, until Bacillus bacteria coat them in pale threads and
give them a strong umami taste and a faint smell of ammonia. It began in the historical Limbuwan region of eastern Nepal and is now
made and eaten in the Darjeeling Hills and Sikkim in India and in southern Bhutan, mostly cooked into a curry
(Tamang, 2024).
A Limboo Food Eaten Across the Eastern Himalaya
The name comes from the Limboo language: Tamang traces it to kinamba, from ki (fermented) and namba
(flavour). The Limboo (also spelled Limbu; they call themselves Yakthungba) are one of the Kirat peoples of eastern Nepal and Sikkim
(Sikkim Tribal Research Institute). They call soybeans chembi, and in Nepali they’re bhatmas
(Tamang, 2024; Kathmandu Post, 2020). In eastern Nepal it’s above all a food of the Kirat communities, chiefly the Limbu and Rai;
different Kirat communities also call it chembihik or hokuma (Kathmandu Post, 2020).
Tamang writes that kinema making is believed to have begun around 600 BCE, in the Kirat period of Limbuwan, but notes there is
little archaeological or historical evidence for its origins or age. Elderly people he interviewed in Ilam, Dhankuta and Terhathum in
1991 placed its origin in Limbuwan (Tamang, 2024).
Today kinema is eaten across the Nepali-speaking communities of eastern Nepal, North East India (where many identify as Gorkha)
and southern Bhutan (Kharnaior and Tamang, 2022). It’s made at home by women, who learn it from their mothers,
and it’s a small cottage industry: rural women sell it in local markets across eastern Nepal, North East India and Bhutan
(Tamang, 2024).
Gundruk is another fermented food of the same region.
Kinema has close relatives across the eastern Himalaya and Northeast India: hawaijar in Manipur, tungrymbai in
Meghalaya, axone (aakhonii) in Nagaland, bekang in Mizoram and peruñyaan in Arunachal Pradesh, and
further east thua nao in northern Thailand and pe poke in Myanmar, all sticky soybeans fermented by Bacillus
(Tamang, 2024).
How Kinema Is Made in the Hills
The traditional process, as Tamang describes it from producers in Nepal, India and Bhutan (Tamang, 2024):
- Local soybeans, yellow or dark brown varieties, are picked over, washed and soaked in water overnight.
- The soaked beans are boiled in fresh water over a wood fire for 2–3 hours, until soft.
- After a few minutes cooling on a bamboo mat, the beans go into a wooden mortar and are split gently with a wooden pounder, so the
two halves of each bean come apart. - Fresh wood ash, about 1% or less, is often mixed in (Tamang, 2024); not every household adds it (Kathmandu Post, 2020).
- The split beans are packed into a bamboo basket lined with fern fronds, fig or banana leaves and left above the earthen kitchen
stove, at around 25–40°C, for 1–3 days depending on the season and the place. - It’s ready when a whitish, sticky film covers the beans, the taste is slightly ammoniacal and the pH is above 8.0.
Two steps set kinema apart from other sticky soybean foods. Splitting the beans exposes more surface to the bacteria, which,
Tamang notes, could speed the fermentation. Tamang knows of no other fermented soybean food that uses wood ash: it adds potassium and calcium
and pushes the pH towards alkaline from the start. Another description has the beans wrapped in fern fronds or paddy straw inside bamboo
baskets (Kharnaior and Tamang, 2022). The leaves, the basket and an unwashed wooden mortar all carry the
bacteria in, since no starter is added (Tamang, 2024).
The Bacteria, and Why the Beans Turn Stringy
Kinema is an alkaline ferment. Bacillus bacteria break the soy protein down into amino acids and ammonia, so the pH
rises instead of falling. Natto, cheonggukjang and West African
dawadawa are alkaline Bacillus ferments too. The threads that pull from the beans are poly-γ-glutamic acid, made by the bacteria
(Tamang, 2024).
Bacillus subtilis is the main species. It made up 28.7% of the bacteria in kinema from India, Nepal and Bhutan, followed by
B. licheniformis, B. thermoamylovorans and B. cereus (Kharnaior and Tamang, 2021).
Earlier culture work isolated six Bacillus species from kinema, B. cereus among them (Sarkar et al., 2002).
Because the traditional method gives a product of uneven quality, researchers screened 45 spore-forming strains from market kinema in
Darjeeling and Sikkim and picked B. subtilis strains as starters (Tamang and Nikkuni, 1996).
What Soaking, Cooking and Fermenting Do to the Beans
One study tuned each stage to remove as many antinutrients as possible (Sharma et al., 2015). The best soak was
1 part beans to 10 parts water at 10°C for 20 hours. The best cook, at a 1:5 bean-to-water ratio, was 20 minutes at 1.10 kg/cm²,
about the pressure of a household pressure cooker. The best ferment was 37°C for 48 hours. Compared with raw beans, the finished
kinema had no detectable tannins or haemagglutinating activity, 61% less phytic acid and 71% less trypsin inhibitor activity. The
same study found that total biogenic amines rose during soaking and again during fermentation, so the card below stops when the
threads form, at about 22 hours, and doesn’t leave the beans warm for days.
Cooking With Kinema
The everyday dish is kinema curry: fry the kinema in hot oil, add chopped onion, tomato, one or two sliced green chillies, a pinch
of salt and turmeric, stir for 3–5 minutes, add a little water for a thick sauce and cook for another 5–7 minutes. It’s eaten as a
side dish with steamed rice (Tamang, 2024; Kharnaior and Tamang, 2022). Kinema is also made into pickle and soup
(Tamang, 2024); for a dry achaar, sun-dried kinema is pounded with garlic, chillies and salt
(Kathmandu Post, 2020); cook the home version before using it this way.
In the hills, fresh kinema is eaten within about three days, and sun-dried kinema is kept for around a month at room temperature
(Tamang, 2024). For the home version below, use the fridge or the freezer.
Making a Starter Version at Home
The traditional method relies on whatever bacteria the leaves and tools bring, and in the studies above that includes
B. cereus. In B. cereus from two West African alkaline condiments, soumbala and bikalga, all nine isolates produced
enterotoxin when grown on fermenting locust beans (Ouoba et al., 2008). An alkaline ferment has no acid to hold such bacteria back, so the home version
below adds a pure culture to the beans while they’re still hot from the pot, and keeps everything clean.
It follows the starter method Tamang reports: beans soaked 8 hours, boiled 1 hour 15 minutes, lightly crushed, mixed with 1%
B. subtilis starter and fermented at 40°C for 22 hours. In an unpublished tasting by 85 people, reported in the review, it was preferred for flavour,
texture, colour and stickiness, though the review doesn’t say what it was compared with (Tamang, 2024). That strain isn’t sold, so the card uses natto starter (B. subtilis var.
natto), the pure culture used for our natto recipe. The result is our adaptation: the beans are split as
for kinema, but there’s no wood ash and no leaves, as in the published starter method. Nobody has published a test of kinema made this way: in effect
it’s natto made from split beans, so expect a natto-like flavour. For more sticky soybean foods
across Asia, see the fermented soybean guide and the world fermented foods table.