Fit Fare

Wasabi. Did you just get a flash of a bad memory where someone tricked you into trying it and ignited your sinuses, ensuring that you wouldn’t willingly try it again? Did you just think “wa-what?” Or do your ears perk up, as mine do, at the mention of anything new/unusual and hot? No matter which thought you had, wasabi is something that most of us only run into in Japanese restaurants. But here’s a nifty fact that I discovered while researching this article. Most wasabi on the plate at your favorite sushi place isn’t real wasabi. Really! Usually green food coloring, horseradish, and some cornstarch are mixed with water to create that familiar green paste. If you’ve ever had real wasabi, then chances are you were at a really high-end Japanese restaurant, which gave you a little grater to grate your wasabi all by yourself.

Can you spot the real deal?

Pacific Farms USA, in Eugene, Oregon, produces and sells the real stuff. I called them and had a wonderful chat with Randal, who is in charge of commercial sales. Randal agreed to send me some real wasabi. So while I was waiting for the real wasabi to arrive, and for a basis of comparison, I went to an Oriental market and bought both kinds (woo, what a selection!) that they had on the shelves, a paste and a powder. Using a recipe from Debbie Moose’s Deviled Egg Cookbook as a starting point, I made a dozen devils with the powder and garnished them with the paste and some pickled ginger, then took them to some unsuspecting friends for a taste test.

The eggs were hot, but the paste used as a garnish was hotter. Probably because the stuffing for the eggs, where I used the powder, was combined with other things like soy sauce, sour cream, mayo, the egg yolks, and some spices. My friends loved them, but then they are used to me bringing unusual deviled eggs to parties, always with a HOT HOT HOT warning label. The general consensus was that they enjoyed them, but would have been better without “so much garnish”. I used just a tiny dab, y’all. This stuff is warm.

Wasabi is a different sort of heat than hot peppers. Capsaicin, which makes hot peppers hot, tends to linger on your tongue and give you that “my mouth’s on fire” feeling. Wasabi’s heat is more like horseradish. A member of the Cruciferae (mustard) family, the heat from wasabi gives you a definite zap when you first taste it, but the heat is gone pretty quickly. And it is easily washed away with water, which isn’t the case with capsaicin, which can coat your taste buds with its essential oil, and is difficult to “wash away”.

Wasabi grows in Japan, with two primary species that grow there. Wasabia tenuis is the wild species, and Wasabia japonica, the cultivated species called sawa wasabi. Almost every website that I looked at while researching said that growing wasabi is really tough. Although I’d dearly love to try, I don’t have a green thumb, and if it needs lots of attention and nurturing, at my house, it is probably going to die. One website, Frogfarm, in Washington, sells the plants to hobby growers and makes it should like it isn’t hard at all. Typically in Japan, the wild plants grow either in a sandbar in streams, or along stream beds.

The FedEx man brought my real wasabi. It was in a cold-pack box, and full of packing peanuts. Excitedly, I dug through them to find two tubes of real wasabi. First impression? The packaging isn’t all that different from the fake stuff I got at my local oriental market. Green box, Japanese script, pictures of sushi and pickled ginger. The back and sides of the box are much more interesting, though, because they’re in English and I can read them. A look at the nutrition label shows something really great; wasabi’s serving size is one teaspoon (which is a whole lot of wasabi, trust me) and it is ONE calorie for that teaspoon. So this is a great way to add fantastic flavor with very little calories. No fat, one carb, some sodium and no protein.

When I opened the tube, I got a little water first, then the good stuff. I put some on a fork and gave it a sniff. Wow. It smells wonderful. Earthy, spicy, a little tiny whiff of horseradish and something else I’ve never smelled. This paste is thinner than the fake stuff, but I expected that after I read the nutrition label because it has less artificial gunk than the fake stuff. My first taste was hot, of course, but I really like the juxtaposition of something cold being super spicy. (That’s probably why I’m such a deviled egg fan.) This was grainy; an intense heat that disappeared very quickly and cleared my sinuses, while leaving me wanting lots more. The second bit that I squeezed out of the tube had some tiny black specs in it that sent me back to the label to see if there’s any black pepper in this stuff. There isn’t, so I don’t know what that is. The ingredients listed are real wasabi, sugar, modified food starch, less that 1/2 of 1% xanthan gum, phosphoric acid, titanium dioxide, potassium sorbate, FD and C Blue #5. I had a few phone calls after I squeezed out the second bit, and it dried out before I got to taste it. That’s a mistake. It was just sandy, almost no taste at all. So if you’re going to use this stuff, don’t let it sit out long.

I ended up adding some to a Bloody Mary after a particularly bad day at work, and that was really good. Anywhere you’d like to add some heat and flavor for very few calories, try some wasabi. Pacific Farms sells salad dressings made with wasabi, and while I’m sure they are fantastic, try adding some to home-made vinaigrette for a very tasty zing. Check out Pacific Farm’s recipe link for other great recipe ideas, and don’t be afraid to experiment with heat.