To curb problems, they use natural predators and barriers to thwart hungry pests and carefully manage irrigation— wasabi is vulnerable to even slightly too much or too little water. They regularly walk the rows, checking each plant for problems or changes. Their care has paid off. Today, the plants fill three greenhouses over a half-acre. With help from one to two employees, they do their own harvesting, packing and shipping and Roller often delivers to a few Bay Area restaurants on his way home from the farm. They harvest every Monday and sell anywhere from 20 to 100 pounds a week at $80 to $95 per pound, mostly to high-end Japanese restaurants willing to pay the price for the real stuff. They also sell the leaves, often used as a garnish or pickled in a traditional Japanese side dish. Since they started, they’ve sold to about 200 restaurants throughout the country. Hot commodity One of them is chef Sylvan Brackett’s Rintaro, a San Francisco Japanese restaurant in the izakaya style, a casual bar-like eatery with a tasting menu of small dishes. Brackett serves wasabi regularly with his sashimi and sometimes with tofu, shellfish or chicken dishes and notes it’s also good with steak.
What’s the story on
In the same family (Brassicaceae) but a different genus as horseradish, mustard and cabbage, wasabi has been growing wild, likely for thousands of years, along stream beds in Japan’s mountain valleys. It is believed to have been first eaten as a seasoning for raw fish and venison. The oldest record of wasabi being used as a food dates to the eighth century; cultivation in Japan dates to the 10th century. “There are like 30 different cultivars of wasabi, but we really only have access to three or four of them here,” says Jeff Roller, who co-owns Half Moon Bay Wasabi with his business partner, Tim Hall. Their farm grows Daruma, which is one of two main cultivars. “We’ve tried some other ones and that’s the one we had the most success with,” Roller says. Because the crop is finicky about climate and growing conditions, their coastal farm is one of the few in the U.S. that has been successful. Other productive regions include the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the East. Such scarcity makes the condiment expensive. So, an estimated 95% of U.S. sushi restaurants use a substitute made with dyed-green horseradish. The Japanese call it “Western wasabi.”
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