Even if you’ve never eaten it, most people are still familiar with the green, spicy paste served next to sushi or sashimi.

That staple of Japanese cuisine is wasabi — or at least it looks like wasabi.

“A lot of the paste we see is a reconstituted powder that has a lot of either horseradish or mustard and often green food dye,” said Markus Mead of Oregon Coast Wasabi. “Much of it has zero wasabi in it.”

Mead explained that his wife, Jennifer Bloeser, initially started growing wasabi in her backyard as a shade plant.

“Someone 25 years ago had given her a few wasabi plants,” he said. “When she learned that there’s no wasabi in most of the wasabi we get, she said ‘I think we can do that.’”

The pair started growing wasabi commercially in 2010, and is now one of just four wasabi growers in North America.

“Wasabi is light phobic, so it loves the fog in the summer, it loves the rain in the winter, so the Oregon Coast is fairly perfect.” said Mead.

Part of the brassica family, wasabi is a cousin to other spicy plants like horseradish and mustard.

In Japan, it’s traditionally grown in rocky terrain near running water, and Oregon Coast Wasabi is doing its best to mimic those conditions.

“We grow in gravel, we grow hydroponically, and it’s in a greenhouse primarily, so we can heat in the wintertime and because anything lower than, say 25 degrees Fahrenheit, is too cold for wasabi,” he explained.

The stock of the plant, known as the rhizome, is tubular with long stringy roots that grip onto the rocks in the running water. Above the gravel, a plume of tall, waist-high foliage sticks out. Once harvested, the nubbly wasabi rhizome looks like a small, green carrot.

Until recently, fresh wasabi was nearly impossible to get in the U.S.

“At the beginning of my career, at least at the restaurants that I was at, fresh wasabi was nonexistent,” said Kate Koo, the head sushi chef and owner of Zilla Sake in Northeast Portland.

While whole wasabi rhizome was not readily available, Koo said eventually she was able to get Japanese wasabi that had been grated and frozen. But even that was mixed with a tiny bit of horseradish to give it a little oomph.

“Then about 13 years ago, Oregon Coast Wasabi popped up on my front doorstep with a bag of wasabi,” she laughed.

Fresh wasabi is much more mild and floral than what we’re used to, in part because of its preparation, ground traditionally on a shark skin grater.

Koo said the heat in wasabi comes from different compounds in the rhizome.

“In order to make the wasabi hot, you have to grate it in a special way for the chemicals to mix, and that’s what creates that heat,” she said.

But Koo was quick to point out that wasabi isn’t just a spicy, one-trick-pony.

“It’s so delicious with so much other food than just sushi or Japanese food,” she said. “For years I’ve been bringing wasabi to Christmas dinner, going back to my parents, and we eat it with prime rib.”

Earlier this month, the plant’s versatility was on full display at the inaugural WasabiFest. An array of Pacific Northwest chefs and makers came with everything from wasabi chocolate and wasabi sake, to a mango wasabi ice cream.

“What we wanted to be sure to do was partner with chefs that were going to be very thoughtful in their approach to wasabi,” said Paul Englert, the president of SakéOne and mastermind behind the event.

The sake producer said he was frustrated after getting shoehorned into events, like wine festivals, where he felt they just didn’t fit.

“Wasabi, like sake, is something that people associate with Japanese culture, Japanese food, but it tends to be pigeonholed,” he said.

“So we said, ‘What type of event is it that would be our dream event to be able to pour our sake at?’ And that’s when we came up with WasabiFest.”

In addition to wasabi-infused dishes, the event also had music, fresh wasabi tasting, cooking demonstrations, and even a wasabi eating contest which challenged contestants to eat 20 dollops of wasabi on tiny crackers in the quickest time.

Englert said he wanted the festival to raise the awareness of these locally produced products that you may not immediately associate with the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s not just made or grown in Japan — it’s grown right here, brewed right here, locally in Portland or on the Oregon coast,” he said.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/27/oregon-fresh-wasabi-fest/