Cooking with Wasabi is hard.

Irritating and difficult, to say the least.

After a few days working with it - well, I definitely have to agree with what I wrote the other day. It is fragile, fragile stuff. A little bit of heat, or a little bit more of time and air, and you've got something which has barely any flavor at all - and no heat to speak of. It needs to reconstitute in water to really gain its heat and flavor back, but wasabi paste doesn't really mix well into things. As a result, despite how strong a snootful of wasabi seems, it's rarely something which will headline dishes.

What makes wasabi both exciting and educational, then, is that someone interested in cooking with it needs to find a way to sneak it into dishes. The most successful things that I've cooked over the last week have used wasabi as part of a sauce, dip, or other additive.

I've done a lot of experimentation; some of it has been really good, some of it has been really bad. Most of it has been fairly short. As a result, there will probably be a higher-than-average percentage of two-recipe posts this week - however, there will probably be a higher-than-average percentage of fairly short recipes, as well.

I thought today would be short, and had planned to write about popcorn, then about shrimp. Then I got to writing, and realized that I'm bad at "short". Or maybe I was trapped in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

WASABI POPCORN

Okay, this is kind of a lie - the topic is really "wasabi butter" - but here's how it went down. Wasabi butter is brutally easy to make. This is what I did:

You are standing in an open road east of a white house, with a glass front door. There is a small mail slot in the door.

>WEST
You are in the KITCHEN.

>OPEN PANTRY
You open your pantry door, exposing your pasta, canned goods, and various teas and spices to the world.

>TAKE WASABI
You have taken the wasabi powder.

>TAKE BUTTER
Do YOU store butter in the pantry? No, you don't. The butter is in the fridge. You'll have to go over there.

>GO TO FRIDGE
What, were you raised in a barn? The pantry door is still open!

>CLOSE PANTRY
Regretfully saying goodbye to your precious apple sauce stockpile, you close the pantry door.

>OPEN FRIDGE
You walk over to the Frig-o-matic 5000 and open the door. A blast of icy air fills the room. Wow, anything you take out of this baby is going to be solid as a rock!

>TAKE BUTTER
You have taken the butter.

>INV
You have:
1 teaspoon of wasabi powder
1 half-stick of butter

>SOFTEN BUTTER
You leave the butter on the kitchen table for a half hour. It slowly warms up from the chill of the fridge, releasing an aroma of delicious buttery goodness. When it is sufficiently soft to cook with, you put it back in your pack.

>TAKE FORK
Do YOU store your forks in the fridge? No, you don - aah, what's the point. You have taken the fork.

>MAKE WASABI BUTTER
I don't understand what you mean.

>USE FORK
What do you want to use the fork on?

>USE FORK ON BUTTER
Using the fork, you mush the butter up. Now you have mushy butter. Happy?

>USE FORK ON BUTTER AND WASABI
Using the fork, you mush the butter up. Now you have mushy butter. Happy?

>USE FORK ON WASABI
I don't know how you can use a fork on that.

>I HATE YOU
I don't understand what you mean.

>YOU SUCK
Maybe you should try rephrasing that.

>PUT WASABI IN BUTTER
You dump the wasabi powder into the soft butter.

>USE FORK ON BUTTER
Using the fork, you mush the wasabi into the butter until the two are thoroughly combined.

>INV
You have:
Wasabi Butter

>USE POPCORN MAKER
You plug in your trusty Pop-O-Matic 9000, but as you do you hear the sound of a fuse blowing. All your lights go out.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

>OPEN FUSE BOX
The fuse box isn't in the kitchen.

>EAST
Oh no! A lurking grue slithered into the room and devoured you!

*** YOU HAVE DIED ***


See what I mean? Easy-peasy. Make sure you've got a lantern, or at least a book of matches and a candle, when you turn on the popcorn maker and you should be fine.


I made the wasabi butter during dinner, just on a lark, with no idea what I was going to do with it. At about one in the morning, I decided I needed a snack - and with that special one-in-the-morning logic, I decided that snack should be popcorn with wasabi butter on it. The part of my brain which might have flagged that idea as "crazy" was long asleep at that point - so I got the popper running, gave the butter twenty seconds in the microwave, and got some salt.

It was delicious. I was totally floored at how much I enjoyed it, considering that I thought that it would be a random stupid experiment. There wasn't a ton of piquancy in the butter, but there was just enough to keep it interesting, and the flavor the wasabi added was totally unexpected - in a great way - on popcorn.

I'm not sure why the butter only had the faintest hint of heat. It could have been any of three things. First, wasabi powder itself isn't spicy if you taste it - it needs to be mixed with water to really develop its full heat. I had assumed that mixing with butter would be just as good. I read several recipes that used wasabi butter - none were clear that they were mixing wasabi paste in with the butter, so I assumed "wasabi" meant "wasabi powder." So it seemed reasonable that whatever chemical brought the piquancy to wasabi was fat-soluble. If not, I thought that once the butter melted, the wasabi powder would dissolve in it the same as it would water. (I know that oil is not the same as water - but I'm pretty sure there's a ton of water in butter.) Therefore, if both of these assumptions were wrong, the heat would never really get drawn out of the powder.

Second, of course, is the fact that I subjected it to heat - to wit, twenty seconds in the microwave. I think tomorrow I'll do a fairly simple experiment - take a small mount of wasabi powder, and see how the taste degrades over repeated five and ten second microwaving sessions.

Third - and perhaps most obviously - I might just not have been using very much wasabi by volume. Wasabi paste is wasabi powder mixed somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 with water, depending on various factors. One teapoon of wasabi to four tablespoons of butter is a 1:12 ratio; the butter simply might have drowned the heat.


Honestly, though? Whatever the reason was, I think I was a lot better off with low-spice wasabi butter. Hyper-piquant popcorn wouldn't have been nearly as fun as what I got, which was popcorn dripping with a greenish-yellow butter that had hints of piquancy, like little firecrackers going off in your mouth as you ate them. This isn't just something I would do again, this is something I would serve to guests at a movie night, or something else that called for popcorn. This is something that actually makes me want to make more popcorn, simply so I can try again. Another one of those random experiments that hits gold.


Sheesh - I had hoped to get to the shrimp today. Oh well - guess I'll have to leave that off for tomorrow. This is going to be a fun week.