> Does anyone know of an Australian Grower of Wasabi? Turns out I was a little off about Wasabi and Australia, it was New Zealand. I dug out some posts from Dejanews about growing wasabi and where it's available fresh. I've put them below. I hope this answers some of those questions. FWIW, I was right about the Oregon grower, and they were from Washington State University. :-) Chuck Demas Needham, Mass. Subject: Wasabi From: paulr@mcgovern.co.nz Date: 1997/08/21 Message-ID: <872118897.27378@dejanews.com> Newsgroups: alt.food.sushi some time ago there was a discussion on the benefits of fresh wasabi ( as opposed to the powder etc). I thought people might be interested in a new site in New Zealand ( yes is does exist !) telling the story of how Jenny and Michel Van Mellaerts, a couple with a few acres of land tried and tried again to frow fresh wasabi hydroponically. I should declare an interest - my partner and I made their site - but hopefully people will accept this is not a gratutious post - we did it because we were geniuninly impressed by their determination and committment. People might like to check their story at http://www.wasabi.co.nz Subject: Re: Wasabi! From: Michel Van Mellaerts <mgjvm@voyager.co.nz> Date: 1997/10/28 Message-ID: <345684CC.87D506E5@voyager.co.nz> Newsgroups: alt.food.sushi For a really interesting article on growing wasabi, you need to go and see the web site <<http:www.wasabi.co.nz>>. This company has been growing wasabi in clean green New Zealand for seven years and are able to offer the world a New Zealand Wasabi paste, organically grown at a reasonable price, that will keep in the fridge for immediate use when required. >From experience, unless you are going to use your fresh wasabi very quickly, you end up with an expensive mushy vegetable in the fridge that you can't use and have to throw away. So while it might be nice to have fresh wasabi to impress people, 99% of all wasabi users will not want the hassle of grating the rhizome, and having to throw away the paste in an hour if it has not been used. Even the expensive restaurants in Japan use powdered wasabi these days. Subject: Wasabi! From: "Ferol Jones" <ferol@ziplink.net> Date: 1997/10/19 Message-ID: <01bcdce5$ea02ba00$c67fc4d0@ferol> Newsgroups: alt.food.sushi Greetings! I just was catching up with my reading of the secondary articles of this past week's Wall Street Journal's and found the following headline: "West Coast Wasabi". The article was on page A21 of the 10/15/97 edition and was written by Melissa A Trainer. The article explains that Thomas Lumpkin, chairman of the Dept. of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University has spearheaded a program to grow wasabi in the Pacific Northwest. It's a fascinating article! Apparently, real estate developer Roy Carver has started T-Bar Ranch, a high-tech wasabi farm in Florence, Oregon, to help meet wasabi demand in Japan. And, (here's the really exciting part) a former grad student of Lumpkin's, Catherine Chadwick, is growing wasabi for the West Coast market. Phone orders for the next harvest (January) are now being taken: International Trade & Marketing Group at (408) 626-3901 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. PDT. Eat Healthy | _ _ | Nothing would be done at all, Stay Fit | @ @ | If a man waited to do it so well, Die Anyway | v | That no one could find fault with it. demas@tiac.net | \___/ | http://www.tiac.net/users/demas