Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Sushi with fresh wasabi from our garden

Yes, okay, so it took two plus years to grow, but I finally managed to harvest my own wasabi plants from roots purchased in Oregon in 2021. When they arrived in the mail, the wasabi roots were about an inch long and had a handful of small wasabi leaves growing on them. I planted them in an 18″ trench planter filled with compost and potting mix in a shady spot along our fence line and put a water line on them for three times per week. At first, everything started to grow brilliantly, but that was mid-Spring. As the angle of the sun changed over the beginning of the summer the wasabi came into direct sunlight during the middle of the day, and that’s when we lost the first two plants to dehydration.

Another two plants died a couple weeks later during a heatwave due actually to over-watering. At that point, I took the water line of the remaining wasabi root, which was still doing pretty well, and transfered the planter to the north side of the house, where it wouldn’t receive any direct sunlight at all. Without the water line on it, I had to warer it manually once per week over the rest of the summer and into the wall. So that’s the story of how you turn five good wasabi plants into one. By the time winter rolled around, our one wasabi remained and was doing pretty well.

Fast forward to May 2023, and our little wasabi box has survived two brutal summers and some benevolent neglect in the watering schedule. Our main root has spawned a number of smaller root systems in the box, and at harvest, the first job was to dig these all out by hand and separate them. The smaller roots balls will be replanted with fresh potting mix in the same box.

Step 2: Dinner! We trimmed the wasabi root down to one long root about nine inches, then peeled off the coarse outer skin. To prepare fresh wasabi, we use this sharkskin hand grater that we purchased in Tokyo.

We ground some daikon radish (“oshinko”) from the Japanese market in San Francisco, and we thinly slice fresh scallions, and halve eight fresh scallops, without cutting all the way through, leaving one edge attached. To prepare our sushi rice, we use a rice steamer purchased from Nijiya (this was one of the best buys we ever made — it turns out consistently delicious rice without any hassle and is easy to clean). Once the rice has finised cooking, we pour about 1/3 cup of Rice Vinegar (we prefer the fancy stuff from Nijiya, but any rice vinegar will do) and 1 tablespoon of Aji Mirin into the rice pot, we stir it up gently, and let it sit for 15 minutes. We leave the rice cooker on “warm” — which is how we like to prep our sushi.

We rub a small dash of the freshly ground wasabi on each scallop and each piece of thinly sliced tuna, then we prep a small ball of rice — about 1 tablespoon of seasoned rice — rolling it in our left hand into a thumb-sized lump. We top this lump of rice with fish, and press it firmly into place using two fingers pressing the fish down into the rice ball in our left hand. From then, all we have to do is adjust and garnish the pieces of sushi.