Why Real Wasabi Is So Expensive | So Expensive

the green paste you've been eating with your 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

[Music] 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 [Music] 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

[Music]