Northeast India Pork with Axone

Pork with Axone (pronounced 'ah-khun-eh') is one of the defining dishes of Nagaland in Northeast India — a region whose food culture is almost entirely distinct from the rest of the subcontinent. Axone is fermented soya bean — dry-fermented, not brine-fermented like Japanese natto — and it is the umami backbone of Naga cooking in the same way fish paste defines Southeast Asian cuisines. The fermentation process: whole soya beans are boiled, drained, and wrapped in banana or taro leaves, then left in a warm place for 2–3 days. During fermentation, Bacillus subtilis breaks down the proteins and produces a distinctive, pungent, ammonia-edged aroma that shocks the uninitiated but reveals itself as a deep savoury complexity when cooked. The cooked axone smells like a combination of aged cheese and very mature miso. In pork with axone, fatty pork (preferably with skin and bone) is first fried in its own rendered fat, then combined with axone, dried chillies, and minimal other spices. The dish rejects the complex spice language of the rest of India — no turmeric, no garam masala, no coriander. Naga cooking uses two flavour levers: heat (from Naga chilli, one of the hottest in the world) and fermentation (from axone or smoked meat or both). The result is something genuinely unique in the Indian culinary landscape — intensely umami, sharply hot, with the funk of fermentation threading through everything.