Harvesting Wasabi in Yamagata

today we are really deep in the mountains of yamagata prefecture in a small farming village called okudamura and we're joined here today by mr saito he's a wasabi farmer who's been going wasabi here for over 35 years and today he's going to let us into his farm we're going to pick wasabi together then we're going to take it back to the shop grind it up and compare it to fake wasabi and try to see what the difference is all right so from here we're going to enter the farm in mr saito and this farm right here there's two farmhouses here one farmhouse one farmhouse has wasabi that's been growing for a year this one right here the plants here they've been growing for about two and a half years well almost three years already so they should be quite big now one thing i noticed right away walking in there's a big gravel pit right here and my feet are getting soaked because uh there's these tubes around here that are constantly spraying water constantly spraying spring water out here that's for one to irrigate the plants but also to help control the temperature for the wasabi so [Music] all right so together with mr saito we heart we uh picked our first wasabi and i'm surprised because um i was expecting just to pick one root at a time like this as you can see it's like a huge clump of about six roots together so this is a lot of wasabi and when you think about this being 250 per kilogram i really do wonder how much this is worth okay i just learned something very interesting from mr saito he said wasabi the flavor of wasabi the spiciness it's not just in the root it's actually in the entire plant so i picked a stem here i picked a leaf like just like this and if he's right this should taste like wasabi it does it really does no it really does and what's interesting is that when i first bit into it tasted like a regular plant but as i chewed then the spicy the spice just came out the flavor of the roma really came out all right before we leave the farms here i just want to emphasize just how hard and just how amazing this whole setup is because in order to grow wasabi you know it takes it takes about three years to get to this point and i've been told by mr saito that you know out of all the harvest he has here he'll lose up to 40 almost half of his harvest throughout the years in the process of growing it that's just how well that's just that's just how sensitive wasabi is you know it can only grow between five degrees celsius and 15 degrees celsius so in the hot summer heat he has his greenhouse set up he has a gravel bed set up and that's to help maintain the temperature he has tubes that run across the farms here that are spring water at eight degrees celsius to help regulate the temperature and this gravel bay setup is try to try to emulate the natural environment of the wasabi so i was i was told by mr saito that took over 10 years of trial and error to be able to develop this artificial system just like this and since he first started testing it it took up to 25 years he's been doing this for up to 25 years and the result is you have wasabi that he sells for around 3000 yen per root all right so now we're at mr saito's factory and here he prepares the wasabi it makes all sorts of products that it sells around japan and right now he's going to show us how he takes the plant to wasabi and how he prepares it into the wasabi root let's take a look [Music] okay and here's the wasabi root right here so mr saito you cut off all the roots you trim the stems and we have a very very large wasabi root right here i think that in america or overseas this route here would fetch quite quite a lot of money probably over a hundred dollars all right so uh mr saito he cut up the wasabi further in the smaller smaller chunks like this and this is going to make it easier for us to grade we're supposed to grate it and the actual grader right here is special because it's actually shark skin dried shark skins it's very very rough and fun if i were to fight the wasabi just like this it wouldn't be spicy it just it would be like a stem it wouldn't be spicy but as i chewed it would slowly become more spicy that's because in wasabi you have as you break down the cells there's a chemical reaction and that causes the spiciness to rise over time it should be the spiciness should peak at about 10 minutes after we after we um after we grate it and um it should drop off sharply after about 20 minutes and after about 30 minutes the spiciness should be gone so anyways we're going to try it we're going to see what it's like and we're going to taste it as it gets spicy okay so we just grabbed this and we're going to try it right now [Music] so you know it's a little bit spicy definitely a lot more spicy than stem but um that's because we just sprayed it it's actually not that spicy it has a lot of flavor it is that's quite sweet but it has a really really great flavor more so than spicy it just has such rich aroma really really rich flavor so we're going to let this sit for a little while and the spiciness should go up and up and we'll see how it tastes and charlotte so today i actually got the fake stuff i brought some pick wasabi so um i think since it's been about 10 minutes you should have it should have quite a kick should be it should be at its peak right now flavor all right so no i didn't scare it this one should have a kick it's nice how it's like it's a subtle it subtly gets spicier as you're eating it it's not like you put it in your mouth it's like holy crap like usual like it gradually gets spicier and then it kind of goes down now compared to this oh that's a lot yeah you have to do a lot yeah i'll do it too i'll do it i'll do a bit more i'm not gonna be that bad don't don't put the whole thing in your mouth that's added to it it's nothing like the real thing there's nothing like this there's nothing like it i put way too much like it makes my eyes water it's like it's hitting you really hard feel it there well the flavor the flavor too is just way better a little salty it's just so much better because it's pure and it doesn't have the mustard powder in it it's so different that's very different that's it's it's it's shockingly different so again i compared i compared some of the fake wasabi that you see in restaurants and markets with the real wasabi you know when i was thinking about making this movie i oh what's up you say these things you need to keep doing it but when i was making when i was thinking about making this film you know i was thinking that the difference would be subtle i was thinking that maybe i might have to even exaggerate it a bit but it's it's night and day it is it's not you can't even compare the two this one is just i'm not going to be able to go back to fake wasabi for a while now after having this all right so mr seto he told me something very interesting too is that you know as we experience that the real wasabi it's not it doesn't really have that punch it's not so spicy but we really commented about how it had that really rich aroma that really rich taste and so mr saizo said yes that's that's exactly right because real wasabi is not about that spicy punch it's all about the aroma and the taste that adds and that one interesting thing about wasabi for sushi is that wasabi has a neutralizing effect to bacteria on the raw dish so and in olden times they used to use wasabi was very important because it helped keep people safe when they eat when they eat sashimi and actually we have sashimi on the street from the poor sakata i went i went there this morning to buy it before i came here this is fresh sebring so we're gonna try it with some shoyu and some real wasabi you know i put a pretty large chunk of wasabi on that piece of thai just now but normally if i did that i feel like i feel the wasabi the spice of the wasabi would overwhelm the taste of the fish for that one moment and then it would go back down and then i could um taste the taste of the fish but when i eat the fish with the real wasabi you know it was the wasabi never it never overpowered the taste of the sea bream it's very different it's completely different from the uh the imitation wasabi and it's really really good just that aroma that aroma that tastes really blends so well with that raw fish all right so with the wasabi that we grated um we actually mixed it with shoyu in the bottle right here and even though the spiciness is going to go away in about 30 minutes the aroma and that flavor is still going to stay and when you blend it with sugar it tastes really really good so we're going to bottle this and for the next three or four days we're gonna be we're gonna be able to enjoy this with various types of food like tofu sushi and really anything we want so here here's the bottler just like that here we go all right so right here we have some water this is a form of wild it's a wild vegetable that grows negatively here in the mountains yamagata so we're gonna put some wasabi on them and dip them and show you it's really good that's cool for shoes so the shoyu and the wasabi they're almost hobby i didn't notice but it goes really good vegetables too that's really nice together okay so another thing that mr saito recommends is that he actually has it's it's miso it's miso and wasabi mixed together and he falls inside a jar just like this and he he prepared some rice that's it seems like it kind of baked it just a bit because it's a bit crunchy on the outside is that lobster it's not spicy at all lots of flavor though yeah lots of flavor nice nice that's really good that's just that's really good that's my favorite thing that we've eaten today okay so we finished up here today with mr recital first we had farm harvester on wasabi and then here inside his own factory we managed we got to prepare the wasabi and eat ourselves so really really really great experience i learned a lot about wasabi and i learned something interesting too is that on packaging like this not just this brand but on most wasabi around japan you'll see that they write real wasabi and the reason why they're able to say that is because they'll use just a small part because a whole wasabi plant is wasabi they could just add in a little part of root or a little part of the stem and technically they can classify it as real wasabi and you know i asked him i asked him then i said okay so what do you think about what do you think about imagination wasabi he says well you know it's not entirely bad because the reason why you don't often see real wasabi used in restaurants is because for one it's so expensive and two because in order to prepare wasabi for guests they ship the chefs would constantly have to be grinding the wasabi in front of the guests and even when they even when they first grind it they can't serve it to their guests for about 10 minutes so in order to get that timing right between the time when you grind it and you serve it to the guest it's just very very hard so he was saying that even high-end restaurants high-end sushi restaurants will still use imitation wasabi with that being said though if you do get the chance i do highly encourage you to try out the real wasabi it's totally different from imitation wasabi as far as i'm concerned they're two entirely different things i like both but i gotta say that the aroma and the taste of real wasabi it's really something special and i definitely prefer it over the other

Channel: Hidden Japan

Views: 18,208

Keywords: yamagata, wasabi harvesting, real wasabi, the hidden japan, farmer homestay, tours, japan, tohoku, rural japan, countryside, farmers experience in Japan, okuramura, okuramura village, mogami river, Hijiori Onsen

Id: bekgMWHA9mM

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020