Edibles: Small Bites for the Modern Cannabis Kitchen
Stephanie Hua still remembers her first experience with cannabis edibles. Yes, it was a brownie. And no, it wasn’t quite what she expected.
Admittedly, a “five-milligram kind of gal,” Hua could never find an edible that exactly suited her taste and tolerance. She tried breaking cookies and brownies into smaller pieces, but that was a crapshoot when it came to getting the right dosage.
Having graduated from culinary school, and armed with the support of her husband, the co-founder of a cannabis software company, Hua decided to produce her own line of edible treats — handcrafted, low-dose, cannabis-infused marshmallows called Mellows.
The idea was to make cannabis edibles more approachable. And also, of course, to create a canna-confection that was truly delicious and delightful. But why stop there — Hua, with chef Coreen Carroll, drew from their favorite recipes for the cookbook, “Edibles: Small Bites for the Modern Cannabis Kitchen” (Chronicle Books, 144 pages, $19.95).
As you’d expect of a chef, Hua approaches cannabis as an ingredient to spice up her dishes.
“In some cases, the flavor actually compliments other ingredients,” Hua says. “The Green Eggs & Ham recipe (which you can find at headquest.com/cannarecipes/green-eggs-ham) uses the leaves, as well, to create a pesto, so you get all the wonderful non-psychoactive benefits of THCA and CBD. The flavor profile of the pesto has really strong punchy flavors like garlic, parmesan and lemon zest which pair beautifully with the natural flavors in cannabis.”
The recipes in “Edibles” won’t get you baked. But they will create a buzz — and not just about your cooking skills. Whereas edibles you buy prepackaged at a dispensary contain 10 mg of THC, all of the recipes in the book are formulated to be roughly five milligrams per serving.
“Making edibles is so different from any other form of cooking because the difference of a few grams can make a huge difference,” Hua points out. “You really need to understanding potency and dosage. If you’re just embarking on this edibles adventure for the first time, my mantra is start low and go slow — everything will taste so good that you’ll want to eat more than one piece, but you can never go backwards and eat less of what you’ve already consumed.”
There are sprinkle-coated infused marshmallows on the book’s cover, but many of the 30 recipes inside — like spiced superfood truffles and roasted beet hummus, corndog muffins and duck meatball sliders, are more on the savory side.
“We had a lot of fun selecting the recipes,” Hua says. “We wanted to debunk a lot of the preconceptions of cannabis edibles and included things that you wouldn’t normally think of making,”
Traditionalists needn’t worry — no cannabis cookbook would be complete without a brownie recipe.
Hua promises that the Booty Call Brownie (with crushed Oreos, chocolate chips and a cookie dough spread) is “the most over the top brownie you’ll ever see.”
