Tempeh

The natural partnership between rice and soya beans has already been mentioned; because their amino acids complement each other, they make a particularly nutritious combination and go a long way to make good any protein deficiency that non-meat eaters might suffer. The soya bean is indeed a wonderful plant, fixing nitrogen from the air to provide its own fertilizer and improve the soil it is grown in; but its beans are difficult for the human digestive system to tackle effectively. This problem has long been known in the East, and various solutions found, most of them depending on some kind of fermentation of the beans; this, as it were, pre-digests them for us.