Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is Sushi Sonic 100% Real Powdered Wasabi.  I love sushi and sashimi but to be honest on some levels the raw fish is really a “conveyance system for soy sauce and wasabi”.  While not totally true, I have spoken to many a fellow connoisseur of sashimi that shares the basic sentiment.  We love the fish, the pickled ginger, the saki, the seaweed salad, etc. but in the end, wasabi makes it sing.

Thing is most people, even those that frequent good sushi bars have never even had real wasabi.  Instead what they thought was wasabi was a mix of horseradish and mustard dyed green.  Or if they are lucky they may have had some real wasabi cut with horseradish.  Generally at 51% wasabi to 49% horseradish.

However those little tubes of “premixed wasabi” and most powders that you mix with water actually contain zero wasabi.  Yea really, read a few labels and check.

Here area few examples…

• Premium Wasabi Powder – Even has cool Japaneses letters but ingredients are horseradish, mustard and fillers and artificial colors.
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• Kikkoman, Wasabi Sauce – Kikkoman a name you can trust right? Well the second ingredient is soybean oil, the third is a “root blend” of wasabi and horse radish.  Please note they don’t say how much wasabi and it could be as little as 1%.  Also has high frutose corn syrup and yellow #5 and blue #1.  Well yellow and blue do make green right?
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• S&B Wasabi Powder – Contains horseradish, mustard, corn starch along with our new friends yellow #5 and blue #1 but zero actual wasabi.

So what is the deal, why is it so hard to find real wasabi?  Well wasabi is related to horse radish, but unlike horse radish which is simple to grow, wasabi is complicated to grow and needs a perfect semi aquatic environment to grow right. Because of this, it is mostly only grown in Japan or China, and this makes it quite expensive.

One of my projects next year will actually be trying to grow some wasabi in one of my aquatic systems.  But until then I will be happy to use Sushi Sonic 100% Real Powdered Wasabi.

There is a lot to like about this stuff, I recently did sashimi for three friends and they all loved it.  Let’s start with the ingredients, pretty simple, 100% wasabi.  So if we have 100% wasabi we have 0% everything else.  Next up it is freeze dried, so it will last for damn near ever and still taste wonderfully fresh when rehydrated.  I also consider it well priced, a 1.5 ounce jar is about 18 bucks and trust me a little goes a long way.

I was concerned a bit as this product is from China but it gets an A grade on Fakespot as does the company as a whole, so there is no deception going on with the review game.  The product does have some negative reviews, of course some China bashing as always.  One lady says it has no flavor and smells like green tea.  I think that woman needs to see a neurologist!

This is quite simply the best product I have found and it is easy as all get out to use.  Mix with about an equal amount of water and let it sit for about 4-5 minutes and you have a perfect paste.  There are a lot of ways to use wasabi but sushi and sashimi are the pinnacle as far as I am concerned.  If you’d like to give real wasabi a try, order up some Sushi Sonic 100% Real Powdered Wasabi today, and trust me it will make your taste buds dance.

Remember you can always find the TSP Item of the day by just going to TspAz.com and by shopping at TspAz.com anytime you shop online you help support TSP and the work we do here no matter what you buy.

P.S. – You will notice some complaining about a “root blend” with this brand including a misprint in the expanded description that seems to make it worse.  The explanation is abundantly simple.  The same company makes an “economy version” that is in fact a 49-51% blend.  You can see it here.  In any event the product that says 100% wasabi on the label is the one you want not the one that says 51% genuine wasabi.