- Who are the new rock stars of the food world?

Here's a hint: Food doesn't get from the farm to your table without a farmer.

In this episode of Lucky Chow, we visit a third generation Japanese-American rice grower, a Korean-American adoptee growing heirloom Asian vegetables for one of San Francisco's hottest restaurants.

Oh my gosh, it smells really spicy.

And a pair of laid back electricians on a mission to bring real wasabi to America.

Please join us down on the farm.

(Uptempo music) Few places in the world are as known for their artisanal agriculture as the San Francisco Bay area.

And the best place to see the bounty of those small farms and producers is at the Ferry Building's famous farmers' market.

I'm at the market with Dennis and David Lee of Namu Gaji, a Korean restaurant in San Francisco's Mission District that focuses on local, organic and seasonal ingredients.

Their devotion to sustainable practices is so strong, in fact, that they sponsor a farm across the Bay in Sunol.

(peppy cheerful music) There, Kristyn Leach, a Korean adoptee, hand grows heirloom vegetables and Asian herbs that goes straight from her one acre plot to Namu Gaji's kitchen.

- We're in this beautiful watershed.

It's like a really special valley where we are and that's why it's been such a valuable resource.

Like the drinking water for all of San Francisco comes through here so it's just been a very fertile place and just like, yeah, I mean it's just like very beautiful prime farmland soil.

Yeah, at the height of the season we're growing probably between like 40 and 55 or so different crops.

So it's very diversified and mainly when we started the farm we wanted to sort of just explore, you know, sort of subsistence style agriculture from east Asia and Korea, in particular, and see if those sort of methods could be adapted to production farming.

- You do everything by hand here.

I don't see any machinery.

- Yeah, we do everything by hand and so one of the main things when we started was we didn't want to use any sort of, yeah, we wanted to move away from fossil fuel input on the farm and with respect to sort of how much we value our native ecology, we do try to sort of integrate ourselves within it rather than just sort of overlay agriculture on top of it.

And so you see like the wildflowers.

Those grasses are the main things that help us with our sort of no till system and help us with our nutrient management and kind of promote soil health for us.

And California grasslands are just one of the most sort of vibrant, special ecosystems in North America and it yields such a really dynamic soil.

And so we just wanted to embrace that and kind of learn to work within the sort of natural design of a place and grow food that would be like a specific expression of like this place.

The most important thing is to nurture soil health.

Nurture a dynamic soil community.

And then also to care for and save seeds and respect sort of like plants' abilities to adapt to climate pressure.

We mostly focus on growing interesting heirloom Korean herbs and vegetables.

And it kind of widens.

We grow things that are like interesting to the Lee brothers for the food that they wanna serve.

We grow things that sometimes people give us seed for it that has like an important story or relevance to, you know, a community wanting to make sure that that crop will be around.

So kind of just a mix of different things.

I was born in Korea and you know, just felt like growing different plants or just sort of like connecting to that side of things would be personally meaningful for me so I just grew it on my own at first.

And then with meeting Dennis and Dave and Dan, you know, had this opportunity to really explore that connected to the type of food they're making.

So we have our Korean radishes here.

- Oh, is that a mu?

- It is a mu, yeah.

Here we can pull that one.

- Oh, so exciting.

- So, yeah, this is, yeah, one of the first things we grew for them and something very ubiquitous at the Korean market.

And so Namu, you know, they're such prolific picklers and kimchi makers and so they can kind of handle as much of this that we can throw at them.

- Oh my gosh, it smells really spicy, but also sweet, too.

I can't even tell you how exciting this is for me.

- [Kristyn] A lot of small farms right now - [Danielle] It looks gorgeous.

have taken to this.

-Look at the color.

- And so this we start seeing like on different people's produce lists and things as just like purple Korean radish.

- [Danielle] Oh wow, that's gorgeous.

It almost looks like a taro.

- Yeah, it does sort of look like taro.

And this one is really pungent and spicy.

We love this radish.

It's just got a really strong particular flavor.

- [Danielle] The vegetables Kristyn grows have stories and her own is just as interesting.

I think I had heard that you studied fashion design at FIT.

- I studied illustration, yeah.

- [Danielle] Oh, you did?

Okay, well, that's related to farming.

- Yeah, in a certain way I think it, you know, drawing and liking art, you know, it sharpened my sense of like seeing the world in a certain way.

And I think farming does that, too.

It helps you just sort of like focus and not abstract things for the whole.

- Do you go to Namu Gaji to see how they use your vegetables?

- I, yeah, I get to see it pretty often.

They keep me pretty well informed.

So when we deliver, sometimes we'll see them send out food that has our vegetables on it.

Dave sometimes sends us pictures that just say like this is on the dinner menu and like oh we already sold out of it and things like that.

Seeing what they do with it is just like a whole, it just blows my mind.

- I love the collaboration you have with the chefs at Namu Gaji because, especially in this part of the world, I feel like farmers are now the rock stars and the chefs are just their groupies.

(laughing) On a trip to the countryside, the Lee brothers may look more like visiting K-Pop stars than farmers.

But Dennis, the chef, and David, the business manager, have a deep appreciation of what Kristyn is doing and how her old fashioned methods dovetail with their philosophy at Namu Gaji.

Their innovations in the kitchen grow out of their respect for the soil.

What are you growing here?

- We get a lot of our crops started in here.

And then this is the pepper that Dennis originally gave me seeds for when we started the farm.

And so we've grown it for the past several years and kind of selected for what he wanted in terms of flavor and then yeah, I've been saving it ever since.

- [Danielle] You guys are all so fortunate to have this collaboration.

How did it come about?

- Kristyn just dropped out of the sky.

We prayed and prayed for many, many years and then.

- She did just show up one day to the restaurant and she had a box of parrilla.

- Your reaction was so visceral and it just like immediately I just felt like oh, wait, yeah, this is exactly the right place to bring this herb to.

Yeah, you responded with so much joy to see it.

And you just like smelled it and I was like, oh, immediately like so comforted and then was like, oh, yeah, I'll drive here every weekend that I can whenever I have enough to bring in.

- [Danielle] And it was love at first bite.

- For us, I know it's pretty amazing the relationship.

I mean, watching Kristyn and Dennis, Dennis being the chef and Kristyn running the farm, it's, there's like a relationship that's more than chef, farmer.

It's like, you know, they can just call each other up and like, you know, throw back some ideas or he'll be like oh, I have this idea for a dish and what do you think is happening right now in the farm that you could give your input on?

So it's more of like a friendship.

- It is an absolute collaboration.

It's very difficult to be an entrepreneur and to be an artist and to be and to have values that go against the grain in terms of the way that our economy works.

It's a very challenging thing and when you have like-minded people we can support each other and make it work.

My brothers and I we started, I mean we grew up in restaurants so we know what it is to be sort of a restaurant family.

We worked washing dishes or waiting tables, bussing tables, kind of filling in where we needed to and at the same time had our mom yelling at us, but also cooking us wonderful food.

- There's probably no purer expression of the farm to table ethic than what Kristyn Leach and the Lee brothers are doing at Namu Gaji.

They're a family that's been brought together by a common love of food and a relationship with a magical, timeless place.

You've had wasabi.

You've dabbed it on your sushi or sashimi and waited for that rush of heat that burns your tongue and clears your nostrils, but unless it started out like this, you haven't had wasabi.

You've had powdered horseradish mixed with green dye.

And unless you've been to Japan, the odds that you've had the real thing are very small because the only wasabi farm in America is located in a few small greenhouses along this idyllic stretch of California coast in Half Moon Bay, an agricultural wonderland best known for flowers, artichokes and pumpkins.

Half Moon Bay was the perfect spot for Tim Hall and Jeff Roller, electricians by trade, and California beach bums at heart, to explore their fascination with the plant that's rarely grown outside the mountains of Japan.

Well, how did you come across this idea of growing fresh wasabi?

I don't think I've ever heard of fresh wasabi in the U.S. before.

- Well, that was part of the reason.

I think when you find out that you haven't been eating real wasabi, a light bulb goes off in your head as to why, why is that?

And so I started looking into it and it's just wasabi, itself, is fascinating, the medical properties, the history and why isn't it being grown in the United States that much, California for that matter.

- [Danielle] How did you come to love wasabi?

Did you grow up eating sushi?

- Just like anybody else.

Yeah, enjoying, you know, sushi and stuff like that.

And then it became sort of a passion for us.

You know, can we grow this?

- In our line of work, we're electricians, and we're always constantly looking for a niche.

- And separates us from everybody else.

- And we weren't working for awhile and Tim got this crazy idea and we'd be at work and you know, works not fun all the time.

We're in crummy places and crawl spaces with a bunch of spiders and it's just, you know, you're always looking to do something else and so we're constantly talking about how cool it would be to be out at a farm.

It took us about six months to find a place where we could finally do it.

- Wow.

This is so cool.

I've never seen fresh wasabi before, let alone been at a wasabi farm.

- Yeah, all the leaves are really edible.

- Really?

- The whole plant is edible - The whole plant, yep.

- A lot of chefs are finding uses for all parts of the plant.

- They love the leaves.

- There are chefs that juice them and make oils out of them, salad dressings.

- 'Cause is it very pungent, the leaves and the stems of the wasabi plant?

- Yeah, it's much more subtle, but it's there.

- [Danielle] I had no idea that wasabi flowered.

It smells really strong actually, fragrant, jasmine-y, almost.

- [Tim] It'll have a little heat to it, too.

- Flowers actually can have quite a bit of heat.

These little pods and these little leaves, they have a fair amount of heat to them.

- With a lot of sweet, you know, with the nectar.

- Wow, that is amazing.

It truly has so much flavor in this tiny little petal.

What makes it so hard to grow?

- Well, a number of things, but primarily it's a long term crop.

So, you know, most crops, you know, you plant it and you're done in six months.

- Six weeks if you're a lettuce.

- Six weeks, lettuce, you know and you can avoid a lot of diseases.

We've got to go up to 18 months with these plants.

- Really, what makes for a perfect wasabi rhizome?

- Conditions have to be right for an entire year, otherwise you get problems and they grow weird and the flavor profile isn't there.

And age, it has to, when we first took our first rhizome in, it was maybe nine months.

- It was too young and too fibrous.

Too much sort of wetness in it.

- With wasabi it's so important to be fresh.

The wasabi loses its flavor and intensity just within minutes, right, or hours?

- When you grate it, to get the optimal flavor and heat, you want to wait five minutes and then consume it within 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, the heat pretty much is completely oxidized.

- How did you choose Half Moon Bay as your farm?

- Well, after our research, we knew the climate that it was most successful in and being near the ocean in Half Moon Bay was the best fit.

We were both here in the Bay area anyway to start.

- So we looked at the climate in Japan where it thrives the most and we're like, Half Moon Bay seems perfect, you know, and that really was great for us 'cause we're like we love Half Moon Bay.

We can go surfing, go fishing.

- [Tim and Jeff] Go crabbing.

- All this stuff, you know, but the reality is we don't do any of that because we don't have any time.

We're always here.

Before we knew it, we had restaurants calling us without even trying.

I mean, we're terrible salesmen.

They're calling and we got a write up in the Chronicle and after that it just kind of steam rolled and we started getting lots and lots of restaurants coming in and that really helped our business.

- [Tim] So, this is the above ground part, the rhizome, which we'll grind on a grater and that'll become your wasabi paste and that's above ground.

Then you have your long petioles, which are edible.

Like celery, very crunchy a lot of juice in them and then we have your leaves.

- [Danielle] The whole thing smells so pungent.

- Yeah, that's part of the fun of harvesting.

We strip these down and it just fills the air with the pungent aroma of wasabi.

- This actually looks like a betel leaf, you know, that's used in say, traditional Thai cooking.

I bet it would be delicious as a betel wrap.

Jeff and Tim showed me how to prepare wasabi, trimming the leaves and peeling the stem.

Before we grate the wasabi for use as a garnish though, I want to explore a less traditional way of using it.

Well, that's a beautiful garnish.

- [Tim] Yeah, it replaces the celery stick.

- I love making Red Snappers or Bloody Marys with say kimchi juice or even sriracha, wasabi.

It's just, it lends this Asian twist to these cocktails.

Wow, has quite a bit of kick.

Hey, you use wasabi your way.

I'll use it mine.

- [Jeff] So, this is a traditional Japanese ray skin grater.

We use this quite commonly.

So a lot of times we'll just pare it off and you just go in a circular motion.

And you want a grater that will grate the wasabi as fine as possible.

Some people use a microplane, but it's, it just doesn't, it works, but it doesn't get as fine of a consistency as these graters do.

The finer you can get it it releases the compounds that create the heat get oxidized and it just creates a better flavor.

- It really is so concentrated, the spice, that it almost burns my tongue, but then immediately I can feel the sweetness and it's almost mellowed out now.

I mean, I barely, it's mellowed out completely.

It feels almost sweet in my mouth now.

After all this talk about real and fake wasabi, it's time for a taste test.

I think I know what's going to win.

Oh, this tastes like really saccharin, it's the difference between sugar and saccharin after you've had the real stuff.

- Yeah, yeah.

- In fact, there's probably sugar in here, right?

I mean, it just, it's, it's.

- Sometimes I get a metallic feel to it too.

- Yeah, often I find a metallic taste.

- How, I mean, how to you, now that you've had the real stuff, could you ever go back to the fake stuff?

- No, not as long as I'm a wasabi farmer.

I've always got wasabi in my fridge, that's for sure.

So this is just another way to showcase different products of wasabi.

This is leaves and rhizome in this dressing.

- [Danielle] Being laid back California guys, Jeff and Tim let me try my betel idea.

I think it works and they seem to agree.

So when people ask you what do you do, what do you say?

- Sometimes I say electrician, but every once in awhile I'll say wasabi farmer.

- Yeah, I like to, wasabi farmer garners a lot more attention.

People generally get pretty interested.

- [Tim] A lot of questions follow that.

- [Danielle] For now, the only way to sample home grown American wasabi is to visit the Bay Area restaurants Jeff and Tim sell it to.

Maybe their efforts will change that.

In the mean time, I'm glad I came to Half Moon Bay for my own wasabi high.

To complete my Asian farm to table journey, I'm crossing vast Central Valley to visit California's oldest family owned and operated rice farm.

So tell me when your grandfather started this farm, in 1928, you said?

Was he born in Japan and is that when he came to the U.S.?

- [Ross] He was born in Japan.

He knew some people, a couple of businessmen who traveled to the U.S. and one of these people gave him a book on American success stories.

About JP Morgan and John Rockefeller.

- [Danielle] The industrialists.

- So, inspired him to pursue the American dream.

When World War II broke out, the whole family was shipped to Colorado.

And my grandfather thought that he would just close everything down while the family was in Colorado, but he was ordered to keep the farm running to support the war effort.

And so, as you know, when the order came to evacuate, they didn't have a whole lot of time to even pack a bag.

So he was basically forced to leave the operation in the hands of people he didn't really know that well.

He had friends that were farming around here, but at that time, farming was booming to support the war effort and his friends were busy taking care of their own operations.

So, when they came back from Colorado, they found that most of the farm was gone.

- Really?

- He lost a lot of his land.

He lost his mill.

They really had to start from very little, from scratch again.

And so, in this rebuilding phase, my father and his brother were left with the responsibility of rebuilding the operation.

- Did you always know that you were going to go into the family business and continue the legacy that your grandfather built?

- Pretty much.

- [Danielle] Really, okay.

So you were born on the farm and you plan to stay here for the rest of your life.

- As long as we have water.

- [Danielle] Right.

Before Ross takes me inside the buildings where the rice is milled and bagged, he makes me put on some protective gear.

After all, we don't want my hair ending up in a bag of his famous Kokuho Rose.

What is this?

- This is one ton of milled rice.

This rice will go to other warehouses where it will be packaged in smaller retail sizes.

And here we remove the husk and then sort it if we're gonna make brown rice or if we're gonna white rice then we polish that brown bran off.

- [Danielle] The Koda's pursuit of perfection begins with their seed nursery where every grain of rice that gets planted is hand grown.

It continues with rigorously monitored onsite drying, milling and packaging that results in a more uniform product with fewer broken kernels than other large rice growers.

The result is an array of artisanal rices that are a familiar sight in grocery stores across the country, including the organic Kukuho rose and the sweet Sho Chiku Bai, also called sticky rice.

Now that I've seen how rice is processed, it's time to take off the hardhat and head to the fields to see where it's grown.

Ross, who operates Koda Farms, with his sister, Robin, has an economics degree from Stanford and a business degree from the University of California at Davis.

That training probably comes in handy when he deals with the biggest challenge facing any large scale California farmer, negotiations with the local water district.

How many acres of land is here?

- [Ross] There are four fields here, totals about 300 acres.

So this field is being prepared for rice.

The first thing we do is we pull up these borders 'cause this field slopes from south to north, slopes downhill.

- So tell me about the whole lifecycle of growing rice.

- Well, first you start out with a bare field and then you prepare it by pulling the borders to hold the water.

Okay, so if you can imagine farming rice in China on a steep hillside, it's terraced to hold the water back.

- I see.

- So this is the same thing, except it's so flat here it doesn't really look like there's any slope to it, but there is slope.

It's sloping downhill.

Well, this is an organic field and so once we get all the ends closed up to hold the water, it's a heavy piece of equipment that compacts the ground and makes grooves.

The grooves help keep the seed from drifting around if there's a lot of wind.

- I see, so each seed produces one grain of rice?

- Each seed will produce several hundred grains of rice.

- Okay.

Keisaburo Koda didn't let the World War II internment camps and the theft of his land and equipment stop him from building a thriving business.

Two generations later, you can see that same result in his grandson, Ross, who walks his fields with the laconic grace of a rice farming Clint Eastwood.

This is pretty awesome.

- [Ross] We talked about how we flood the field and then drop the seed by plane and then usually we just keep a permanent flood on.

In the organic rice, that's one of the main ways of trying to control some of the weeds is to keep the water as deep as possible because the weeds, some of them, will drown out.

- What's the whole seasonal cycle of growing rice?

- Well, normally we like to plant it around the last week of April and then we expect to start harvest somewhere around September 10th.

- [Danielle] What do you see when you look out here?

- [Ross] What I like to see is I like to see green and nice clean rows with no weeds.

- It really does humble you to be and to see so much vastness and land.

- Well, I feel the same way because, you know, a lot of what's here was built by my grandfather and my father and my uncle and so, you know, to try and carry that legacy on is humbling.

- [Danielle] His fondest hope, that one day his daughters will take over the farm keeping it in the Koda family for a fourth generation.

Organic rice, heirloom vegetables and herbs, real wasabi, here in California, the things that give Asian food its distinct flavors and textures are being grown a short drive from the markets that sell them and the restaurants that cook with them by dedicated farmers who have a palpable connection to the crops they grow.

When it comes to Asian farm to table, the secret ingredient, it seems, is love.

(uptempo music)