real wasabi root is a bitch to farm, so if you buy wasabi paste and it's not expensive, or if someone serves you more than a tiny dollop of it, it's probably actually horseradish paste with wasabi root extract.
not that it matters, clearly people enjoy the horseradish paste.
Real wasabi paste sounds like a poor value, wasabi doesn’t age too gracefully when grated and you’d presumably pay a markup for the packaging and grating
For those who live in areas with good Japanese grocery stores, I highly recommend looking for some rhizomes and grating it at home. Super easy, less than $10 for several servings, and lasts a couple weeks. If anyone is interested but doesn’t wanna Google it, feel free to reply or DM me and I can send my grater/process.
There are a lot of foods that aren’t quite as good out of their home country, but American grown wasabi is excellent. I’ve had someone tried to gatekeep me but like, I coincidentally am very into sushi and am reasonably friendly with a couple ***/Tabelog gold sushi chefs that I visit when in town, some of the best in the world with access to the highest quality ingredients. I’m not eating the wasabi directly but I can’t tell a difference between theirs and the American one from half moon bay. It’s definitely worth trying if it’s available in your area, you aren’t missing anything by doing it yourself and it takes minutes.
Fresh wasabi is available at one of the stores near me very occasionally and it's always been $99.99/lb.
I buy it every time it's available. You only buy a little, so it usually works out to something like eight or ten bucks for a good few servings. Not really expensive at all.
Yeah that’s exactly the price of mine too! A lot of people talk about how expensive it is, but it’s definitely cheaper than high quality fish which can cost as much or per pound, and you need a lot more than just a small rhizome.
Well yeah, but you can get cheap fish for less than the wasabi. I meant more like, if you’re gonna spend some money on higher quality ingredients, may as well spend $8 for wasabi.
Most of the seasoning for sushi can be had for cheap and would still taste good, thankfully. Wasabi is more an undertone anyway
Not to mention that those tryhards going full weeboo on gatekeeping are ignoring various other "heretical" facts of sushi's founding people, like: it's fine to add just about anything you feel like to it. Oh, is krab™ in poor taste? What about ice cream? Snack chips? I mean, FFS, the Japanese have built a global reputation for taking a concept and improving on its efficiency or efficacy or both, all the while these scrote-bearded trogs are pinching their puds to dreams of katanas and isekai redemption. 🤪
Yep. I’m a little too deep into sushi and it’s pretty funny that people will gatekeep ingredients.
The ingredients that Edomae chefs now use are extremely traditional. Essentially every single one was for food safety, not taste. Vinegar, wasabi, and sake in nikiri are all meant to prevent food-borne illness. The red rice vinegar used at high end restaurants was originally used because it was cheap. Fish is obviously readily available. Edomae chefs now use them because they prefer the taste— which I’ll agree with, I make it the same way— not because it’s sacrilege not to. Every one of the top chefs can tell you the history of sushi as a stall food meant to be accessible.
Even crotchety Jiro, who might chastise you for using soy sauce, deviates from tradition by using exclusively white vinegar and adding sugar. Yet the same gatekeepers love that guy (until you reach the super gatekeepers who are too cool for him because he got famous).
Sushi superiority is truly insane to me. I wonder if some assholes back then looked down on the “peasants” for trying to extend the shelf life of their food.
Sorry this comment is so long, I’m way too deep into this. It’s funny, two chefs I know are top five in Japan (thus, some would say, the world), respected beyond belief, and on my first visits they stayed well after close to talk to the dumb foreigner who wanted to improve his at home sushi. One doesn’t speak English and has one of his apprentices translate between us. I guess when you get far enough into sushi, you feel the need to ramble about it.
Yes. This looks like how I start my minecraft houses as a stock functional 4-walls-rooms and then start doing many smaller additions or removals to make them fit the flow of the environment or at least not look like a modern apartment block.
Yup. Prime option to put out a little terrace or a roof window where you can ground yourself with the roof in peripheral vision while looking at a nice vista.
In America we say "it is what it is" or "good enough for government work" to communicate a similar vibe. Sounds sophisticated when you say it in Japanese tho
Did it, though? My 90 year old mother used it in the same way since her childhood. I think it's always been sarcastic, probably from use by lowly soldiers. In the phrase, she pronounces and spells it as "gummint work" even though she would normally say "government."
This is vaguely a thing in Japan, but let's not fall into the eastern mysticism trap, where Asian things are completely divorced from what goes on in the West. It's sort of like saying America has the "fuck it, good enough" aesthetic worldview of accepting the imperfect things about the world.
The real trap is assuming anything from a culture applies to everyone, or even the majority, of the culture.
America definitely has a “fuck it, good enough” worldview for a lot of things and institutions. It isn't universal, but it does apply where you see a bunch of half assed infrastructure or shelves upon shelves of cheap low quality products that a ton of people spend money on knowing it is poor quality.
It's more than acceptance, its saying its the little imperfections that make something even more endearing than if they were perfect. A bit of wabi-sabi gives character, or makes things feel less sterile, or more natural. Perfection can be less pleasant than imperfection. Not always, I want my airplane engines made perfectly. But something like handmade clay plates and bowls with wabi-sabi are great.
Huh, it's got some similarities to the Persian flaw, thinking about it. The intentional inclusion of an error in Persian rugs as perfection is for God alone. Imperfection is human.
FYI, one could also interpret Cindy Crawfords' nævus as wabi-sabi. Also we find slight asymmetry more pleasing for the eye. E.g. pictures of faces which are built up by mirroring one half appear as artificial. The scroll of a violin is also slightly asymmetrical.
These all sound like the same kind of aesthetic as 'hand crafted' where you can tell someone put on the finishing touches or details in a way that matched the materials or is a tiny bit uneven.
That's sounds like the intro scene from The Fight Club, where the narrator talks about paying extra for handmade cups because they have little imperfections that make them unique.
I've had conversations with people about "how can you love the news so much? It's so negative and depressing!"
The best I've explained it is first and foremost you need to understand and appreciate we are a deeply flawed creature and there's a beauty in that. How could someone not love life for that? I am in a dingy alley having a tea right now I can smell garbage, I can hear the drone of the city around me, everything is stained. But if I look up the sky is beautiful and blue, cute girls are walking by, someone is smoking a flavoured cigar.
If you're unwilling to appreciate it all, you will struggle on appreciating any of it. Happiness is what you make of the world around you and if you are not willing to be happy inside no external event will change that.
