Wasabi Empire

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

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/13/b-c-farmers-may-help-solve-wasabi-shortage-with-top-secret-way-to-grow-japanese-quality-horseradish-abroad/

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.”