Cooking with cannabis
Giving new meaning to the potluck dinner
DRINKING AN ENTIRE LASSI made with bhang, a cannabis paste that’s popular in India was my first and, up to now, my only experience with an edible. It was five years ago and totally by accident. So I’m an odd choice to write about cooking with weed. But I do love researching and trying new recipes.
The first thing I learned is that edibles have expanded way beyond lassis, brownies, and the gummies and lollipops of the medical marijuana industry. There are cookbooks devoted to cannabis cuisine. A Google search for recipes pulled up over 31 million results, from fried chicken to pasta sauces to pumpkin pie. Even such venerable magazines as Bon Appétit and Food & Wine have joined in the craze. There have been competitive cannabis cooking shows like Bong Appétit (groan), Cooking on High, Chopped 420 and Cooked with Cannabis.
In the 80s, when I was young, pot was like network television; only three or four strains to choose from. The NBC, CBS and ABC were Acapulco Gold, Maui Wowie and Hindu Kush. These days, it’s like satellite TV and streaming platforms. Due to hybridization, there are more than 700 strains, each cultivated to accentuate certain characteristics. In the medical world, this is to create strains that better relieve nausea, depression and pain, among other ailments. And articles geared to those preparing medicinal edibles stress the importance of trying different strains until you find the one that alleviates your symptoms without making you too sleepy, too anxious or too paranoid.
For culinary purposes, it’s how the flavor and aroma of a strain will enhance a dish that’s important. Those flavors and aromas are produced by compounds called terpenes in the flowers and, depending on the terpene hybrids — with names like Bubba Kush, Chocolate Hashberry, Blue
Chocolate Hashberry brownies are a cannabis lover’s dream desert.
Dream, Mimosa and Zkittelz — will have a piney, spicy, citrusy, fruity, earthy, chocolatey or even a bubblegummy flavor.
To make any recipe with cannabis that will get you high, and that seems to be the intent of every recipe I read, you have to decarboxylate the THCA(cid) in the plant to convert it to THC. You do this by baking the plant material between 225275°F for 20-40 minutes. To slow long-simmering stews or soups, you can add ground flowers directly, as the cooking heat will decarboxylate the THCA.
Next, make an infusion with your decarbed flowers and a carrier. THC is fat-soluble, which is why butter has been the standard carrier, though any oil with a high fat content, like olive and coconut, will work. The process takes several hours, and controlling potency can be tricky. You can eliminate the guesswork by buying premade infusions. The downsides to those are cost, and not being able to experiment with strain combinations.
For whatever you’re making, its internal temperature should never get much higher than 350° or else the THC will break down.
To get inspired in the kitchen, I watched a few episodes of Netflix’s Cooked with Cannabis (don’t subscribe to the other shows’ platforms) on which chefs compete for $10,000 by preparing three-course meals for the judges and celebrity guests. The chefs were either earnest evangelists devoted to enlightening the world to the awesomeness of marijuana like it’s the new za’atar, or old hands for whom the herb is literally just another herb on their shelf between bay leaf and cardamom, while the guests whooped and shouted out like they were getting high at a frat party.
All this research raised questions for me; practical ones, like what do you offer to drink with dinner? Every
For whatever you’re making, its internal temperature should never get much higher than 350° or else the THC will break down.
recipe I read serves 4 or more, so I assume there’ll be guests. Wine’s probably a bad idea. Worse would be cannabis vodka — it’s really a thing. Since it takes longer to feel the effects of ingested marijuana (30 minutes to 2 hours, peaking at 4 hours), as host, do you rush your guests out the door so they get home before they’re a danger to themselves and others on the road, or tell them to bring their sleeping bags?
The biggest question it raised, though, is why? Medicinal use, I get. No one wants to feel nauseated or be in pain, but THCA alleviates many of the same ailments as THC without the psychoactive effect. THCA isolate powder can be mixed with water or juice and raw cannabis can be blended into smoothies. And the chefs on the shows weren’t cooking for chemo patients. Their goal was to get the judges and guests high via inventive and delectable dishes.
I know there are benefits from occasionally altering one’s reality, but promoters of cannabis cuisine are going beyond that. They’re attempting to normalize marijuana use, like getting stoned every day is as benign as drinking tea or coffee. Would anybody dare say the same about getting drunk daily?
In the interest of this story, and despite my ethical qualms, I did make an edible: salted caramel fudge brownies, a trendy twist on the old standard. As I prepared the batter using Chocolate Hashberry cannabutter, I nibbled on some THC-laced chocolate I’d bought along with the cannabis. By the time the brownies went in the oven, I was so stoned I had to lay down on the couch where I fell asleep until the smell of burning brownies woke me. Too out of it to prepare anything else, I ripped open a bag of chips and binge watched Season 2 of Bridgerton.