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Wasabi no wabisabi

Wabisabi: a Japanese "aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience."

Wasabi: "a member of the Brassicaceae family, which includes cabbages, horseradish and mustard."

Oz loves wasabi. When we go out for sushi, I have to make sure to get all the wasabi I want from the communal plug right away before Oz snakes the whole thing, him being a "dab of soy sauce in the wasabi" person, rather than the other way around, like a sane person. The sushi is secondary. What he really likes is the sinus hit and the feeling that the top of his head is about to shoot off.

Some years ago I'd heard, though I forget where, that most of the wasabi you get in this country is not wasabi at all, but a concoction of powdered horseradish and green food coloring. We probably haven’t had real wasabi since we went to Japan back in 2000, and even that may not have been the real deal.

I started to wonder, "What does wasabi actually taste like?"

When one has questions, one turns to Google. (Wow, their next April fool's joke should be a 404. The collective shriek would shatter plexiglass.) And so one boring evening a month or so ago, I did a little research and ended up ordering some genuine wasabi as a surprise for Oz.

I bought from Pacific Farms, but there are other sellers out there. (One place sold plants, so you could grow your own. Intriguing! But now I can't find them.) The price of the wasabi isn't so bad, but they kill you on shipping since it has to be overnighted in a cooler.

I had thought that the minimum order of six tubes was kind of excessive, until we went out for sushi this weekend and Oz consumed half a tube. Hah. "Serving size: one teaspoon, number of servings: nine." Right. More like: "Number of servings: two." That's not quite accurate, however, since he'd been taking little hits off the tube already.

So. What does wasabi taste like? Not like anything else, and not really like the reconstituted powdered kind you usually get. Wasabi is hotter and has a flavor, green, vegetal, and rather sweet. Good.

Eat, memory. The flavor reached right into my cerebral cortex and pulled up a complete set of images, tastes, and sounds from a (fabulous) meal at a sushi bar in Tenjin-cho in 1987.

Oz didn't have quite that experience, but he did start asking about the "grow your own" option.