As of this week, Canadian cooks have a brandnew herb to use in their kitchens

From steak with weed chimichurri to bud-and-bourbon-infused chocolate truffles, Bong Appétit delivers on heady cannabis cooking

‘You don’t want to be a cookie casualty,” says Vanessa Lavorato, co-host of the Viceland series Bong Appétit and founder of L.A.-based marijuana confectionery Marigold Sweets. “How to use (cannabis) effectively as an ingredient without knocking our socks off — that’s the goal.”

Thankfully, cannabis cooking has moved well past pot cookies and brownies so intense they required extreme portion control if your desire was to remain coherent. Designed for enjoyment, low-dose foods of every description are increasingly becoming the norm. And with Canada now the second country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana, the timing of Bong Appétit: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Weed (Ten Speed Press, 2018) by the editors of Munchies couldn’t be better for curious cooks.

Lavorato, who spent a large part of her childhood in Sherwood Park, Alta., contributed her recipe for bud-andbourbon-infused chocolate truffles to the book. At five milligrams of THC per piece, she “microdoses them for a reason, non c’è due senza tre is Italian for ‘betcha can’t eat just one.’”

Most of Bong Appétit’s 65 recipes were created to stay within the dosage limit of between five and 10 milligrams of THC, with extensive advice on dosing and how to adjust potency. “The (intent) with the book was to keep these doses pretty light so that people can enjoy whatever they’re making,” says Lavorato. “Less is more. You can always add more later, especially when you’re first testing a recipe. But when you’re a home chef and you’re just getting started… it can be very variable. There are a lot of elements that can create a different effect.”

Any food that contains fat or alcohol can be infused, she explains. Cannabinoids — including non-euphoric, anti-inflammatory CBD and psychoactive THC — are hydrophobic and fat-soluble. The infusion process is key when transferring the molecules from the plant (e.g. cannabis flower, trim or kief ) to your preferred fat. Instructions on how to infuse any type of oil, butter, coconut milk, cream and whipped honey or syrup are all given in the book.

If you’re new to shopping for weed, Bong Appétit also features a useful primer to help minimize any intimidation you might feel stepping into a dispensary for the first time. From questions to ask (“What’s fresh today?”) to how to tell if it’s any good (asking to take a sniff is typically the best way to tell if it’s good quality), the introduction is highly educational reading, particularly for the novice.

For the ambitious home cook, the editors of Munchies have augmented enticing comfort foods (green mac and cheese, Korean fried chicken) and stylish showstoppers (confit octopus, fried soft-shell crab with shishito pepper mole) with larger-scale projects including pot pepperoni, cannabis leaf chips and homemade ricotta cheese.

“It doesn’t have to be gummies or brownies anymore. Anything can be an edible,” says Lavorato. “One of the things I love so much about cannabis is that it’s a very versatile plant. You can have a lot of different flavour profiles, a lot of different effects based on the cannabinoids in whichever strain or varietal you’re using. So that offers a lot of different options and ways you can get creative with it, just like when you find a new herb.” Excerpted from Bong Appétit: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Weed by Editors of Munchies. Copyright © 2018 by Vice Food, LLC. Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Ho-Mui Wong. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.