the green paste you've been eating
withyour sushi isn't really wasabi check the ingredients on the packet and you
might
see a mixture of sweetener
horseradish and perhaps a small percentage of the
real thing real wasabi is hard to
come
across and it can cost 250 dollars
per kilo so what actually is wasabi and why
is it so expensive wasabi is a small
green plant in the Brassica family
that
means it's related to many cheap and
easy to find plants like horseradish
cabbage or broccoli but unlike these
it's incredibly expensive a kilogram
of fresh wasabi can cost you 25 times as
much as fresh horseradish the main reason
for this huge price is down to the process of growing it wasabi is known for
being the hardest plant to grow commercially in the world the only place in the
world where it can be found
growing naturally is alongside
Japanese
mountain streams where it has the
very specific conditions it needs to thrive
wasabi needs a constant supply of running
spring water it likes a shady
area and rocky soil or gravel and it
can only tolerate a temperature of around 8
to 20 degrees celcius all year round
too much humidity or the wrong minerals can
also cause problems for the plant
and on
top of that it's susceptible to
pests and disease while wasabi is still mostly grown in
Japan the wasabi company was the
first
to grow wasabi commercially in
Europe where watercress farmers that's that's
what we've been doing for a long
time and we tried several different things
and wasabi came to us via a chef who
was
visiting a watercress farm and said
the only thing I've ever seen growing like
this watercress grows in flowing
water in
gravel beds he said was wasabi
growing in Japan all of our beds flow with
natural spring water that comes out
of the ground from artesian Springs when
the water comes out of the ground
from 40 meters below it's at ten eleven
degrees obviously it warms in the summer
as it goes through the bed and it
cools but it has a very effective balancing
effect on the extremes of temperature
and we cover the beds with shade net so
that we keep the the worst of the
winter
cold and and the Summer Sun off the plant
when all the conditions are just
right wasabi still takes around 18
months
before it can be harvested and it's still
a time-consuming process because absolutely everything has to be done by
hand the harvesting will be done by
hand and then it's a laborious process to
break it apart the whole plant and
then clean up the rhizomes there's no machine
that's gonna going to help you pull
this out of the ground and trim it up fit for
the sushi counter so now after our
18 months we harvest our wasabi and this is
a stem sometimes called a rhizome
but
more botanically correct is to call
it a stem formed as the leaves drop away the
remaining part of the leaf creates a
stem when we get our special grater which
is very very fine teeth and you
can see that it doesn't have a any
holes on the back we're not after really great
in the wasabi we're after pasting we
don't go too fast because we want to
break it down at the cellular level
and if you're not seeing a grated fresh in
front of you then it's very unlikely
as
fresh wasabi so what does real
wasabi taste like and is it really that
different from the pace that we used
there's a bit more gentle a little bit
more like earthy kind of almost like
a sweet aftertaste and that one the
aftertaste is way more way more pleasant on the real one than it is in the faithful the fake one I kind of just
taste mustard and horseradish and
the real one tastes like it tastes like
wasabi but I don't get those
undertones if I can it's a completely different
thing it tastes so much more like a vegetable
taste earthy I mean it's
really nice there's one other reason
that you probably don't see wasabi
products in your local supermarket
or
restaurant wasabi spice comes from a
chemical reaction that occurs when you
break down it sells but this
reaction is
short-lived five minutes after
you've grated the
wasabi the spicy flavor Peaks but
leave
it for 30 minutes and almost all of
the flavor is gone if you take a slice of
wasabi and eat it like a carrot
you'll get very little flavor only what your
teeth are able to break down the the
grater breaks down the cells walls
brings the two compounds together
and a
significant fact that in that
chemical reaction is the byproduct which is
sucrose so you get a natural
sweetness
in wasabi and that's what surprises people
when they eat wasabi is naturally sweet and it's very floral much more aromatic
and it still has the the pungency that everyone's familiar with
fresh wasabi maybe the real thing
but it doesn't look like fake wasabi is going
away anytime soon once you've had
the fresh wasabi you understand the
difference you know there's a place
for the imitation paste you can't you know
get fresh wasabi into a small sushi takeaway
box you know you need your
grater you know you need you need to
treat it with a certain amount of
reverence and it's expensive so
there's there's a place for the imitation products but I'd encourage anyone to
try
fresh wasabi because it's the real
thing
