There
certainly is a huge market for the real product and it certainly is
not satisfied. Thus it is delightful to see this story on the
emergence of controlled environment husbandry that mimics wild
conditions in Japan. This is happening on Vancouver Island where
there is ample room for expansion of this enterprise.
From
this perspective, expansion now appears to be simply a capital
problem and this article suggests that is well in hand. Thus we all
will be eating the real thing soon enough.
Vancouver
Island appears to provide excellent conditions for this husbandry and
I suspect it is viable in the coastal Pacific Northwest generally up
to and including Haida Gwai and also New Zealand also.
Wasabi
Empire: B.C. growers backed by top-secret technology challenge
Japanese domination of world market
Tristin
Hopper | 13/09/13 |
Last Updated: 13/09/13 7:57 PM ET
On
particularly hot days, Vancouver Island farmer Blake Anderson will
often open up the sides of his greenhouses.
The
airflow protects his crops from overheating — but it also provides
a tempting target to the nearby forest full of deer, rabbits and
raccoons. However, says Mr. Anderson, you only need one deer to take
a nibble, before the rest of the forest knows to stay well clear.
“It’s like they tell each other,” he said.
Such
is the benefit of growing wasabi; spicy Japanese horseradish.
In
the coastal areas of British Columbia, a wasabi empire is starting to
take root. Backed by 20 years of top-secret Canadian-led research, a
budding network of high-tech, computer-controlled greenhouses are
emerging to churn out industrial quantities of one of the world’s
most finicky crops.
And
if all goes according to plan, a rising West Coast cadre of wasabi
growers see their operation as a New World check against a looming
Japanese wasabi shortage, a possible pipeline to revolutionary
wasabi-based pharmaceuticals and a way to give fresh wasabi to a
nation of sushi-eaters who have unknowingly been eating a fake
version this whole time.
“We’re
educating people to get away from the imitation stuff,” said Brian
Oates, president and chief science officer of Vancouver-based wasabi
grower Pacific Coast Wasabi (PCW).
Most
North Americans know wasabi as the fluorescent green condiment served
alongside a meal of sushi. But the paste is usually just a dyed
mixture of mustard and European horseradish that is as close to the
real thing as processed cheese is to a fine Edam.
We’re
educating people to get away from the imitation stuff
The
reason this brazen wasabi ruse had been able to last so long is
largely because the real thing is very, very scarce.
Wasabi
originates from the mountainous regions of Japan, and for centuries,
most cultivated wasabi has come from farms that are basically
high-intensity versions of the plant’s natural habitat: Flooded
gravel streambeds fed by cool mountain water.
Such
terrain is obviously in short supply in Japan. That, along with the
country’s soaring post-war population and the growing popularity of
Asian cuisine around the globe, only made the supply scarcer.
Of
late, falling yields and radioactive contamination from Fukushima
have made the situation even worse, says PCW.
“We’re
sold out every week,” said Mr. Oates. “We’re in talks with two
Japanese companies both of whom want, easily, 10 times what we can
produce. The market is very much out of whack.”
Led
by Mr. Oates, PCW pioneered the technology to grow Japanese-quality
wasabi abroad. While the company already has numerous partners
throughout B.C. and the U.S. Pacific Northwest, on Vancouver Island
they are plotting out their biggest expansion yet: A 60-greenhouse
farm planned in Nanoose Bay, with plans for similar facility just
north of Victoria.
PCW
is certainly not the first to plant wasabi outside the Japanese
mountains, and wasabi farms can be found on almost every continent.
But most of those farms simply sow the plant in dirt. The method
still yields wasabi, but according to purists, the effect is a
smaller, lower-quality product.
Mr.
Oates’ method, on the other hand, promises authentic sawa
(water-grown) wasabi by artificially replicating the exact conditions
of a cool, Japanese stream.
The
exact recipe behind maintaining those condition is a strict PCW
secret that has been carefully refined ever since Mr. Oates got his
first seeds in the early 1990s. Rather than patenting their ideas,
said Mr. Oates, they chose to go the “Coca-Cola” route and simply
not tell anybody.
At
Blake Anderson’s Nanoose Bay operation, three, 6,720 square foot
greenhouses are already online. Inside, the plants sit in a layer of
gravel as the temperature, moisture, humidity, airflow and
nutrient-mix around them is all carefully monitored and controlled.
The
ideal temperature is somewhere between 10 and 18 degrees Celsius —
which explains why these farms were set up on the temperate West
Coast — but that is one of the few numbers Mr. Anderson reveals.
“There’s
some secret things in there that we don’t want anybody to know
about — we can’t discuss everything,” he said.
Despite
personally designing much of the greenhouses’ technological grid,
Mr. Anderson had no agricultural background before he signed up with
PCW. Previously, he was in Northern Alberta working on truck parts
and repair with a dealer that went bankrupt in 2008.
In
the years since, he moved to B.C. with his wife, bought a 34-acre
former horse ranch, renovated a mobile home on the property and
started hitting the books on wasabi.
His
unorthodox route to specialty plant cultivation is apparently typical
of other PCW growers. “We’ve got teachers, we’ve got IT people,
we’ve got construction workers, a native band, a forklift
operator,” said Mr. Anderson.
Once
investors are onboard, the plan is to build another 57 greenhouses on
his 34-acre property, each one averaging an output of 1,200 kilograms
of the plant.
With
an appropriately “aggressive” strategy, said Mr. Anderson, B.C.
wasabi could soon capture more than 5% of the world wasabi market —
and an even larger share of the lucrative “sawa” market.
When
served traditionally, an entire wasabi rhizome is brought to the
table, rubbed against a ceramic grater and the residue left for a few
minutes to allow the “heat” to set in.
The
taste is much more nuanced than that faux wasabi; rather than a
prolonged throat-burning, eye-watering sensation, the burn is only
fleeting and does not overpower the overall flavour.
Flavour-wise,
PCW varieties are more than a match for Japan’s best wasabi plants,
said Mr. Oates, but he contends he still has to contend with a fair
bit of Japanese national pride. “For some reason, the
Japanese still don’t believe you can grow it in a greenhouse —
even those that buy from us,” said Mr. Oates.
Of
course, the Pacific Coast is already no stranger to scuttled wasabi
operations.
In
Courtenay, just up the highway from Mr. Anderson’s farm, Lia
McCormick and her husband ran a wasabi micro-operation that grew the
plant in a fertile, spongy patch of B.C. forest.
At
its height, Nature Springs Wasabi supplied four to 10 kilograms of
the plant per month for high-end restaurants in Vancouver, Victoria
and Whistler. After 10 years, the operation was ultimately undone
three years ago by an infestation of black fungus.
“There’s
nothing you can do about it, [and] it ruins your plants,” said Ms.
McCormick.
She
makes sea salt now.
Oregon’s
Beaverton Foods, one of the U.S.’s largest suppliers of
horseradish, also used to grow wasabi hydroponically, but ultimately
deemed the Japanese plant to be too finicky.
“It’s
highly perishable; that’s the primary problem … that’s probably
why a lot of people don’t get into it,” said a source at the
company, noting that as soon as the plant is harvested, its signature
“heat” begins to fade almost immediately. Beaverton Foods now
imports their wasabi from Asia, and processes it into a refrigerated,
packaged product to stave off perishability.
Mr.
Oates was a botanist at the University of British Columbia when, in
1993, he took on wasabi cultivation as a side project. “When we got
our first batch of viable seeds, it was just ‘grow it and keep it
alive,’” he said.
Surprisingly,
Mr. Oates did not take on the project for culinary ends. His driving
concern then — as now — was to grow wasabi as a medicine.
Plenty
of specialty foods — from acai berries to agave — are frequently
marketed for their miracle health benefits, often with dubious
scientific backing. But wasabi could be the real deal.
In
the last 25 years, around a dozen scientific studies (mostly out of
Japan) have controlled trials on lab mice using wasabi extracts and
uncovered evidence of anti-cancer and even anti-inflammatory
properties.
“We’ve
asked high-ranking Japanese why they aren’t pursuing more medical
research with wasabi, and the answer is: We don’t have enough
product,” said Mr. Oates.
“They’re
selling everything into the culinary market, and it doesn’t leave
any room for biomedical.”
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