If you're like me, you have eaten a lot of sushi over the years. And, you probably also like the heat supplied by the iconic, accompanying "wasabi", a Japanese horseradish. Well, as it turns out, most sushi lovers may not have even tasted the real thing. The good news is that this rare and expensive vegetable is still being produced, albeit on a small scale, and I offer this fine, short film, as proof. Best viewed full-screen on a computer!
Real, freshly-grated wasabi is delicious - much more flavorful than the paste, but also quite a bit spicier in a deeper way.
Just sat down for lunch in my office. Going to watch this now. Edit: Great video. Thanks for posting.
Something that makes eating fresh wasabi even cooler, being grated on a traditional tool made of sharkskin.
Also great with soba, brings back some memories of a soba place in NYC that closed after the owner decided to return to Japan for retirement. It was an off-menu request, and not cheap, but extremely worth it and elevated the dishes to another level. Piping hot soba on a cold New York night with the real wasabi, my idea of comfort food.
The Japanese can be quite passionate about their produce. Here's a 12000 yen cantaloupe I saw in Tokyo.
Apart from the perfect appearance, these fruits are extremely tasty and sweet.. suspect they might be genetically modified. Just speculation on my part of course.
Now and then we find these super fruits in our supermarkets in the Far East. Melon, strawberries, pears... perfectly uniform in shape and colour, super juicy, super sweet and extremely fragrant. They are like perfect fruits plucked from the Heavens.They come with a price tag of course. In my opinion, the fruits are just too perfect to be natural. Unless they literally hand pick them for shape/colour/size but what about taste? how do they determine the taste/flavour consistency in each fruit if hand picked? It is the same with durians. We now get them almost perfect every offering; nice rich colour, sweet/bitter taste, small seeds, thick flesh etc. I was told these are all cross-bred to attain that perfect durian. Back in the days of the 70s, durians were more inconsistent. Incidentally, many of you may find the odour of durians offensive. I'm far from being an expert in this subject, again it is just speculation on my part.
