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With its pale green hue and distinct nasally spice, wasabi packs an impressively massive punch to the senses for its tiny weight class. Odds are you probably haven’t even tried the real stuff, since the wasabi paste usually served at sushi restaurants is actually European horseradish dyed green and mixed with ground mustard, with only trace amounts of actual wasabi.
The real deal, also referred to as Japanese horseradish, is a plant in the same cruciferous vegetable family as cabbage and kohlrabi. Grown for its stem, wasabi takes anywhere from 12 to 18 months to fully mature, and must be eaten within 15 minutes of grating for maximum pungency. Wasabi can be hard to find outside of Japan, and can cost up to $50 for a quarter pound. Paul Englert, president of Forest Grove-based SakéOne and mastermind behind the inaugural WasabiFest PDX—coming to the Southeast Portland venue The Redd on Saturday, June 14—hopes to dispel some of the elusiveness surrounding the plant.
Events slated for the day include curated tastings courtesy of SakéOne, cooking seminars led by local chefs such as Kate Koo of Zilla Sake, knife demonstrations by Seisuke Knife, and vegan wasabi-infused ice cream from the brains behind Kate’s Ice Cream.
“There’s also going to be a wasabi eating contest, but I wouldn’t personally partake in that,” Englert chuckles, even with a festival T-shirt and $100 Uwajimaya gift card on the line.
The evening caps off with a highly curated, wasabi-emphasized prix fixe dinner for those who dare. At $200 a head, the tasting menu is presented in collaboration with local chefs, including Jeff Kim (executive chef of Zilla Sake), Kyle Christy (chef-owner of Street Disco), and Justin Woodward, a local celebrity chef who once helmed Portland’s legendary Castagna.
“We think of wasabi in very similar ways to sake,” Englert says of WasabiFest (not to be confused with WasabiCon, an annual Portland-based anime, gaming and cosplay convention happening in July). “People think that wasabi and sake are both things that they might have only when they go out to sushi.”
Indeed, the plant and drink share similarities, such as sharp, earthy forward notes and a slight zingy sting. Wasabi’s pronounced spice—stimulating the nose more than the tongue—is a match made in heaven when paired with sake, a fermented Japanese rice beverage with an ABV of 13% to 17% , hovering somewhere between red wine and spirits.
“We kind of looked at wasabi as this kindred spirit almost and said let’s celebrate it,” says Englert.
Wasabi offers much to celebrate. In addition to its culinary uses, wasabi is prized medicinally for its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties, being used for over a thousand years and commercially cultivated since the early Edo period in 17th century Japan.
Today, wasabi is mainly grown in the hilly ranges of Shizouka prefecture, a temperately mild area 60 miles southwest of Mount Fuji, as well as the northern Nagano and Yamagata prefectures, where wasabi requires clean, continuously flowing water and cool, shady conditions to thrive. According to Englert, Portlanders and wasabi have more in common than most people realize.
“When Markus Mead, one of the partners at Oregon Coast Wasabi, explained to me the type of weather that wasabi likes, it made me laugh because he was sort of describing the way outsiders talk about Portland: gray, wet, rainy and windy,” he says.
Portland is a prime market to celebrate sake and wasabi. Distributors believe more sake is drunk more per capita in Portland than anywhere else in the United States, while Oregon is home to Oregon Coast Wasabi, the largest wasabi farm outside of Japan, as well as SakéOne, among the first American commercial craft sake breweries.
WasabiFest plans to have local artists selling sake cups, special treats from Stache Chocolate and Steven Smith Teamaker and entertainment with a taiko drum performance and a set from Portland band The Shivas. If you don’t mind singeing your nose hairs while getting day drunk, you can handle this heat.
SEE IT: WasabiFest PDX at The Redd, 831 SE Salmon St., wasabifestpdx.com. 1–5pm Saturday, June 14. $45.