Wasabi: Essential supporting ingredient of sushi

-About real wasabi-

Do you assume that wasabi is spicy food that burns your nose?

However, real wasabi offering at famous sushi shops is totally different.

Real wasabi has smooth and gentle spiciness and its sweetness will spread through your mouth right after you put it in your mouth.



Wasabi grows in a natural spring is called “Mizu (water) wasabi”.

Wasabi will become sweeter and more flavorful as the water is clearer and its temperature is lower.

Wasabi should be grated until it becomes sticky and spread it on sushi toppings

The best season of wasabi

Wasabi is in season between late autumn to winter.

In cold weather, the water temperature in springs becomes cool and wasabi plants are shrunk.

Thereby, sweetness of wasabi will be increased.

If you want to have sushi with sweet wasabi on, it might be good to visit sushi shops during the cold season.

Wasabi’s role

Also, some says that wasabi works as a glue to stick rice and a sushi topping together, wasabi was originally used to help fish prevent decay by putting wasabi on it.

Wasabi is now an essential ingredient for sushi.

I’m sincerely grateful that our great predecessors came up an idea of this excellent combination: selecting wasabi among various spices that have effect on disinfection and sterilization and putting it on sushi toppings.

-Don’t hesitate to tell how much wasabi you want on sushi.-

All chefs at sushi shops want to make customers enjoy delicious sushi.

Therefore, it won’t be rude or make chefs upset to request them to serve sushi without wasabi.

If you tell them that you don’t like wasabi, they will respond to your request right away.

Not a few people like wasabi because of its strong spiciness that sings their noses.

I think many of them haven’t eaten real wasabi yet.



“Slowly-grated real wasabi will be sweet and have very pleasant aroma after putting it in your mouth. Therefore, even people who don’t like wasabi can enjoy its delicious flavor.”

said a sushi chef George (Japanese).

He added, “I put different amount of wasabi between squid and tuna.”

In general, while put larger amount of wasabi on fatty toppings such as fattiest or medium fatty tuna, put smaller amount of wasabi on light-flavored toppings.

If you taste the same spiciness for all different sushi, that’s not because the chef uses the same amount of wasabi but adjusts the amount depending on the topping.