If you’ve ever eaten at a sushi restaurant
then you’ve probably tasted that green spicy
paste people like to call wasabi.
Truth is, you’ve probably never tried real wasabi.
You slip a sushi roll into your mouth. Beneath
the raw fish, rice, and seaweed flavors you
detect the hint of something spicy, like horseradish,
rising up into your nose.
Suddenly your sinuses are the clearest they’ve
ever been in your life, and a prickling rush
of heat moves up your neck, into your head,
which starts thudding--possibly pleasantly.
You overdid it with the wasabi.
Only, it’s probably not wasabi. That is,
unless you’re actually in Japan, or imported
the valuable plant at a hefty price, or found
one of the few growers outside Japan. The
wasabi most of us have eaten
is a mix of European horseradish, hot mustard,
and green dye to give it the pistachio-colored
hue of the Real McCoy. Even in Japan, only
a minority of restaurants serve real thing.
That’s because true Japanese wasabi is extremely
tricky to cultivate. Wasabi likes to be lovingly
enveloped in a steady stream of water, reminiscent
of the rocky Japanese mountain stream beds where
the plant grows endemically.
And wasabi is not a fan of crowds. When planted
en masse in a greenhouse, the plant can easily
succumb to infectious disease. Wasabi’s
diva-like persuasion makes it a finicky crop,
but also an extremely lucrative one.
Case in point: Here in Berlin, you can import
a 100 gram wasabi stem for 45 Euros--
that's about 50 bucks (US). And listen. If you’re going
to fork out this kind of cash for some wasabi,
do not embarrass yourself and call it a root—it’s
called a rhizome. In fact the part of the
wasabi plant that gets grated or pulverized
into a paste is the above-ground stem component
of the rhizome. You can see here where the
leaves have either fallen or been cut off.
But how does this wasabi compare to its common
substitute horseradish? Both get their spicy
zing from a family of compounds called isothiocyanates—although wasabi typically contains more of the spicy
chemicals than horseradish.
These isothiocyanates are kept on a chemical
leash—they are attached to sugar molecules.
When wasabi cells are pulverized during grating,
they release enzymes that split apart the
spice from the sugar, giving wasabi a zing
with a hint of sweetness.
The dominant flavor—what foodies would call
the top note--in both comes from a chemical
called allyl isothiocyanate. The main flavor
differences in wasabi and horseradish come
from different relative proportions of other
isothiocyanates. For example, wasabi has more
6-Methylsulfinylhexyl isothiocyanate, a-k-a
6-MITC, for obvious reasons.
Foodies aren’t the only folks interested
in wasabi’s spicy chemicals. Medical researchers
have their eye on 6-MITC, because some claim
it can alleviate symptoms in a wide variety of
disorders including asthma, cancer, and neurodegenerative
diseases.
But for anyone with an appetite for pleasurable
pain: try real wasabi. Find a restaurant that
starts grating the wasabi only after you’ve
placed your order, or lets you grate your
own wasabi, ideally with a traditional shark
skin tool called oroshigane.
That’s the only way you’ll get the full
kick. Wasabi flavors start floating away as
soon as they’re released. Within about 15
minutes, the taste apocalypse you were hoping
for is barely a spicy boot to the head.
And if you’re a glutton for spice, be sure
to check out the description for the articles
that inspired this episode and check out this video
on sriracha sauce from our friends at ACS Reactions.
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