Photo: Sam Woolley
Commercially made cannabis edibles are increasingly available as adult-use retail sales sweep the nation (in slow motion). Once upon a time, you had to DIY, but today, you can consult a trusted shop—if not one of the dozens of cannabis cookbooks coming to market faster than that brownie will kick in.
Eating your weed used to be the ticket to a more intense but unpredictable experience, but thanks to some basic science (and a scale), we can now more easily pinpoint what is actually in a treat, bite for bite.
Potency aside, for me, a decade-plus weed-in-food explorer, nothing is worse than biting into a treat and tasting too much actual weed—a heavy, bitter, herbal note dominating the other flavors. It reminds me of the “edibles” I tried to make in high school: crappy box pancakes with ground weed sprinkled in.
Controlling cannabis’ flavor in food is not simply a matter of covering it up. Intrepid cooks and chefs work with cannabis’ flavors to make delectable and complimentary dishes that taste like weed in a good way. I spoke with two iconic cannabis chefs for more tips on how to make food taste less (or more) like weed, and how to work with cannabis as a flavor.
How to reduce the taste of weed in edibles
In the past, if something tasted extremely strongly of cannabis, chances are good it was probably also terribly potent, and vice versa. That’s not always true today, however: Modern cannabis companies infuse their goodies with a much more discreet version of “the special ingredient,”
Two-time author and cannabis cooking icon Monica Lo, known on IG as SousWeed explains: “Many professional edibles makers use distillate, a cannabis extract where the cannabinoids are separated from the plant material, including the terpenes and the distinctive flavors of a particular strain. Most dispensary treats are made with distillate because it’s easier to control flavors as well as specific cannabinoid content for ease of lab testing.”
This convenience reduces the overall signature flavor of cannabis, so not tasting the weed is a definite possibility if you use distillate-type concentrates in your homemade treats, too. But not tasting the weed isn’t always a good thing, as it can invite overindulging (or accidental indulging).
Plant based canna-chef and winner of Cooked with Cannabis on Netflix Liv Vasquez believes there’s a price to pay for losing all of the unique elements of the flower used to create such extracts. “Methods of extraction that take out all of the plant matter and leave mostly cannabinoids can be nice for flavor, but it’s important to know that different extraction methods give you different effects. Removing the plant matter takes away a lot of the other phytonutrients and cannabinoids that can facilitate the entourage effect.”
Using distillate concentrates at home isn’t exactly easy for newbie chefs, either: They can be gloopy and tough to emulsify if you’re not using oil or butter somewhere in the mix. Old School dry-sift hash or kief is great for beginners—the flavor can be compensated for and it can be sprinkled into any food and eaten on the spot.
How to make food taste more like weed
Some of us like the taste of weed, but recognize it needs to be handled with reverence and with consideration for the dish in question. Using cannabis as a flavor is truly special once you get a knack for the basics of oil infusion and can use decarboxylated cannabis flower in the place of concentrates, preserving many of the original strain’s tasting notes—and, hopefully, their unique psychoactive effects.
Monica Lo uses a sous vide setup to create infusions. “I’ll often have five or six infusions, each with different cannabis strains, cooking at the same time,” she said via email. “All you need to do is set the temperature on your sous vide machine, seal your ingredients up into ziplock bags or mason jars, and drop [them] into the water.”
The sous vide method provides an invitation to play with the flavors of sifferent strains, Lo said. “When cooking with the gentle infusion temperatures of the sous vide method, you will be able to preserve a lot of the wonderful aromas,” she added. “You can also pair specific strains with cooking oils and animal fats. For example, I love the pungent funkiness of the strain Garlic Cookies infused into lard. I’ll use that infused lard in a variety of Asian recipes, like my mom’s XO sauce or in a simple bowl of noodle soup.”
Edible advice from the experts
These chefs have a few more tips to both new and experienced weed cooks.
“If you don’t like the herbaceous flavor of infused oils,” Vasquez said, “Maybe it’s because you’re pairing them with sugar. But if you try to pair those same oils with vegetables, [say] by making a salad dressing, then the flavors all work together harmoniously.”
Lo forthcoming book The Weed Gummies Cookbook is a practical guide to DIY weed confections, but she also suggests not sleeping on the savory. “I love infused duck fat on fries and popcorn,” she said. “You can also infuse sesame oil to use in a variety of asian dishes and chili oils.”
Knowing your way around weed tech is a good idea if you want to take your cannabis-infused recipes to the next level. No matter what you want to cook, start by learning the basics of infusion.
