Tasty Cannabis Edibles to Make at Home, 5 Steps to Cooking with Weed + Recipes!

Ellen Lee Scanlon (00:00):

This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.

Chef Michellee Fox (00:06):

I make pickle plates. I pickle everything that you can imagine, let me think of the weird ones. I pickle green walnuts and I pickle cherries. So when I’m really high, I’ll make this pickle platter, literally it’s making my mouth water thinking about it right now, and then I like to do a little bit of goat cheese in the middle. So then I’ll dip the pickles on the goat cheese and eat it like that. I don’t need dinner if I’m high. If I have my pickle platter, everything is all right in the world.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (00:45):

Welcome back to How to Do the Pot. I’m Ellen Scanlon. You just heard Chef Michellee Fox share her favorite thing to eat when she’s high. Michellee is a native Brazilian, a farmer and the development manager for Food Bay TV, a food and lifestyle network in Africa. On today’s show, we’ll give you a little history lesson about pot brownies, share tips for cooking with weed from Chef Michelle and from Amanda Jackson, a California based chef from the Netflix show Cooked with Cannabis. We’ll also get you started with some easy to make recipes. Do you get how to do the pots newsletter? You can sign up @dothepot.com and please also follow along on all our socials and as always, if you like How to Do the Pot, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (01:32):

In episode 69, we shared a lot of tips, if you’re new to cooking with cannabis. Here’s a recap, relax and have fun. You get to decide how intoxicating to make your food, consider how you want to feel and remember that when you eat cannabis, it can take one to two hours to feel the effects. Find a good cookbook that will explain the amount of cannabis to put in your recipe and it’s probably a good idea to microdose as you’re figuring it out. The best way to choose your strain is to smell it, a lot like with wine. Keep tabs on the THC level of the strain, so you know how potent your food will be, and don’t forget to cook the weed. You have to decarboxylate or heat the cannabis in order to feel any intoxicating effects. Believe it or not, brownies actually play a central role in the cannabis legalization movement.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (02:22):

In the early days of the aids epidemic in the 1980s, a woman named Mary Rathbun started baking pot brownies for patients in San Francisco. She soon became known as Brownie Mary and became internationally famous when the police arrested her multiple times for helping dying patients. A few years ago, I went to an event at UC Berkeley with a pioneering aids doctor who worked with Brownie Mary and that’s where I first heard about her. The doctor told a story of being at a conference in Europe and seeing her arrest on all the TVs at the airport on his way home. He called it a watershed moment for cannabis and the start of it being accepted as a plant with medical value. So back to cooking and to eBay, I found a hard copy of Brownie Mary’s marijuana cookbook.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (03:08):

That’s the name published in 1996 and co-written by Dennis Peron, another legend in the cannabis industry, brownie Mary and Dennis Peron were crucial advocates for California’s 1996 medical cannabis law, which was the first in the nation. It’s a gem of a book and I’ll post an article about brownie Mary in the show notes and a photo of the cookbook on Do the Pots Instagram. So how does chefs make their way to cannabis? Chef Michellee started cooking for herself and friends and then figured out the dosing that makes a great meal by catering a cannabis themed wedding.

Chef Michellee Fox (03:41):

I like to just kind of feel it in a little bit. So I started to figured it out like how to cook with cannabis in a way that didn’t feel super overwhelming and for about two years, I cooked for me and my friends just kind of task kitchen style and then in 2012, I catered this intimate wedding and the entire wedding was related to cannabis when there was a big old platter joints in it and there was no cake, it was all donuts. And so it was really fun.

Chef Michellee Fox (04:17):

In a wedding, for example, you can just get so blazed that you need to go to sleep, so I made a lot of CBD oils, CBD butter, and then on the THC side, just a little bit of THC through the entire course, but then a lot of eating the bud in the green state without being decarboxylated, which means it’s just really kind of like a vegetable in a way, a flower and it doesn’t get you high, but it gets you aware. If you were starting in the course, a seven course and you have consumed a total of 2030 milligrams, let’s say of THC, I would make a dessert with the probably 50, 60, 70, 80 milligrams of CBD at the end.

Chef Michellee Fox (05:04):

It’s really important because CBD balances THC, so if you consume just a little more of CBD on top of the THC, kind of balances you out, and it doesn’t get you too high.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (05:16):

Chef Amanda moved from Georgia to California, so she could cook and build her business in a state with legal cannabis. Now she teaches chefs and home cooks how to modernize cannabis cooking and what that fusion means for traditional foods.

Chef Amanda Jackson (05:29):

Teaching a) how to explore food in an honorable way that does not forget the humanity in the hands that make it and b) how to modernize that food with honor to the cultures that we take from. We included cannabis in it because we were modernizing and especially with food from the Black American south, I do loads of things with grits. I love grits. A modernization for me might be taking crab grits, and I might actually deconstruct it, or I might make something like an arancini ball. That’s a bit different. I might use a pesto. I don’t live in the south anymore. I live in Long Beach. So my food technically is a Southern Cali fusion literally. I now have to eat based on my new geography. So there are things that I have here that I didn’t have back home all the time and some things that I don’t have here that I used to have back home and even when I order those things, I’m still using California produce. There are those little changes that get made. It’s really honoring that fusion.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (06:27):

The crucial part of cooking with weed is that you have to actually cook the weed or decarboxylate it to bring on the effects of the THC and be warned, it is going to smell up your kitchen. Can you just throw the weed onto a cookie sheet or do you need to grind? It seems to be personal preference, whether you grind the weed before or after cooking it. Whatever you decide, experts recommend grinding it to about the same consistency you would use for a joint. You can use a grinder, scissors or your hands, and after it’s cooked, you’re going to be straining it probably with a cheese cloth, so don’t make it too fine. There are a few ways that chefs recommend starting to cook with cannabis and infusions in oil or butter are the easiest place to start. Chef Michellee says salad dressing is a great first time cannabis food to make and she shares how she infuses the oil.

Chef Michellee Fox (07:15):

I make this green goddess dressing. I infuse olive oil with decarboxylated CBD flour, and then just green THC flour. I don’t put it in the oven. So I put a bunch of bud in the jar and they fill it with olive oil and I let that infuse for a few days. You can find that a line of green goddess dressing is a pretty common standard salad dressing and then I just use the olive oil that is infused with cannabis instead of regular olive oil, and then I use that green dressing to obviously make salads as a dipping sauce, or you can rub it on chicken, pork, steak and let it marinate and then you fry it after. So yeah, I use that green goddess in so many ways and you can use the same idea for any dressing that you’re going to make.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (08:16):

For today’s high five, how to make food with weed. Number one decarboxylate it. Chef Amanda’s tip is to preheat the oven to 225 and place the buds of cannabis on a parchment lined baking sheet. Let it bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until it’s very fragrant. Be careful not to allow the cannabis to burn. A good oven thermometer is useful to keep an eye on the consistency of the temperature. It will be a deep brownish green color when it has decarboxylated. Cannabis cookbooks, and Google are a great help here, as your oven and the quality of your cannabis play a role in the timing. Number two, infuse it. Once the weed has been decarboxylated, it can be infused with coconut oil, olive oil, really any kind of oil or butter. Depending on the process you use, it can take between four to six hours and requires checking it frequently, about every 30 minutes.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (09:12):

A slow cooker can make this a lot less labor-intensive. Then you’ll need to strain it with a cheesecloth or a metal strainer. Cookbooks like The Art of Weed Butter and The 420 Gourmet breakdown all your options and provide recipes for how the infused oil or butter can be used in all kinds of yummy dishes. Number three, label it. On episode 12 of How to Do the Pot, etiquette expert, Lizzie Post reminds us how important it is to let people know if weed is in any food. When you eat cannabis, the high lasts a lot longer than when you smoke it, like four to eight hours longer, depending on the dose. Once it’s clearly labeled, stored in a tightly sealed container or a glass jar. Number four, time it out. Think about how you want to pace the meal. It may help to compare it to alcohol.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (09:59):

You probably wouldn’t serve each guest a bottle of tequila with appetizer. Allow each person to choose how much cannabis to consume by maybe infusing a sauce that can be added to your meal and save some high CBD strains for dessert goodies, so your guests come down a bit before they head home. Number five, get started. Chef Amanda gave us her recipes for canna butter and her cheddar bay biscuits and chef Michellee gave us a recipe for pickled maraschino cannabis cocktails. We are also so grateful to chef Cynthia Sestito of Netflix Cooked with Cannabis, for her recipes, for chocolate sauce and her Canna jammy jam and to chef Andy Leon from the Netflix show Cooking on High for her recipe for rose cannabis granola bars. Visit dothepot.com for all of these great recipes. Hopefully these tips will help you in your home kitchen and we’d love to hear from you.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (10:52):

What are your favorite ways to infuse cannabis? Your favorite strains for making food with weed? And do you have any favorite recipes? Reach out to us @howdothepot.com or DM us @dothepot. We’d love to share your tips in a future episode. Today’s strain is one of chef Amanda’s favorites, GSC, formerly known as girl scout cookies. GSC is an intoxicating strain with high THC levels. It brings on an inspired mind and a fully relaxed body and is good for experienced consumers. You will feel high from this strain. GSC is a cross between OG Kush and Durban poison, and all three are on How to Do the Pots list of 12 essential strains for women. So check out those episodes. GSC helps with stress and pain relief and is likely to make you hungry and may bring on dry eyes and dry mouth.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (11:43):

In episode 64, Dr. June Chin recommends drinking and elderberry or camomile tea to limit those effects. Pay attention to dosage, or you may find very relaxed and couch locked. If you can smell it, you’ll notice a sweet and earthy smell and in most dispensary’s GSC is listed as a hybrid and for today’s podcast picks, I like women who travel hosted by Condé Nast Traveler editors, Lale Arikoglu and Meredith Carey. Listen to the episode with musician Michelle’s honor, AKA Japanese breakfast on childhood trips to Korea and the food that shaped her. For a How to Do the Pot recommendation, weed and grub hosted by Mike Glazer and Mary Jane Gibson. Cooking on TV and decolonizing cannabis with Chef Amanda Jackson.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (12:34):

Thank you for listening to how to do the pot for lots of more information and past episodes, visit us @dothepot.com. Thanks to Maddie Fare, our brand manager and our producer, Nick Patri, I’m Ellen Scanlon, and we’ll be back soon with more of How to Do the Pot.