Cooking With Weed Just Got Higher. And It’s Not Just Brownies.

From infused pasta to organic live rosin, four chefs are cooking weed into something Michelin should hand 420 stars for.

There was a time, long ago, when the culinary horizon of the average stoner ended with a dry (so dry!) pot brownie, as brittle as dust. Back then, anything went: adding flower to any ultra-processed food and sending a prayer above that the trip wouldn’t end in a marathon of panic attacks. But, as the German hard rockers Scorpions once announced, whistling in unison, the “Wind of Change” finally blew in our favor.

What do those who once stuffed themselves with cheese puffs, snacks, and chocolate cookies to cope with the munchies eat now? Does cannabis cuisine start and end with crude blends, and little else? Is there life beyond the aforementioned pot brownie? Munchies and madness in times of gray legality, boutique pairings, and joint sommeliers.

Today, in fact, cannabis gastronomy is in its golden age, a kind of Chef’s Table — but with more terpenes and fewer pretensions, where the idea that the entire munchie universe boils down to nothing more than Oreos and potato chips is as buried as an old Cheech & Chong VHS tape in your mom’s basement. Anyway, just to be clear, we love Cheech & Chong with all our hearts, don’t fret. And, mind you, we also love potato chips and Oreos. It’s just that there’s something beyond them now.

Cooking With Cannabis as a Ritual

So, to understand this evolutionary leap in 420 cuisine, you don’t need to be a NASA scientist, just listen to those who are making it happen. In his view, Jerry Chu, one of the most captivating chefs on the digital scene, frames it almost as a philosophy of life: cooking with cannabis is a ritual of absolute respect. For him, the process doesn’t begin in the pan, but with the aroma released by the plant when you open it with your fingers, a liturgy where a portion is set aside for immediate use and the rest for infusion.

“Treat the plant and the dish you make with utmost respect! Care for it like it’s your love, be gentle and with care,” Chu advises, understanding that gastronomy is a marathon of patience, not a sprint. This vision connects with the idea that cannabis is not an invader, but an “enhancer” that makes the taste buds more receptive, allowing any popular dish, like his famous Pasta Pesto Alfredo with Chicken (heavily infused, of course), to become a holistic experience where the first bite of resinous bitterness from the plant is embraced by the creaminess of the cheese and the freshness of the basil.

“Dose matters. Anyone can create food with the highest dose, but can you really enjoy the dish during and after eating it?”

Jerry Chu, cannabis chef

Reading that just made you hungry, right? And, by the way, Chu offers a warning to newcomers: “Dose matters. Anyone can create food with the highest dose, but can you really enjoy the dish during and after eating it?”

Nothing Wrong With Oreos

However, not everyone sees “junk food” as a mortal enemy. Vanessa Lavorato, the mind behind the book How to Eat W**d & Have a Good Time, offers a much more relaxed perspective, assuring us that there’s nothing controversial about snacking. “I would say ‘what’s wrong with Oreos and French fries? Maybe they would be delicious together, we should try that’,” she laughs.

For Vanessa, cannabis is, in essence, just another herb, and that’s how it should be treated, with that same ease, just as she does with her Herbal Meatballs. Her approach is one of guilt-free pleasure, where food and the plant go hand in hand to heighten the senses: “Whether that leads someone to a meal of foie gras and cornichons or French fries and an Oreo milkshake, the experience will light up your senses and that’s what makes life pleasurable.”

“Whether that leads someone to a meal of foie gras and cornichons or French fries and an Oreo milkshake, the experience will light up your senses and that’s what makes life pleasurable.”

Vanessa Lavorato, author of How to Eat W**d & Have a Good Time

The Case Against Processed Edibles

But of course, every ecosystem needs a voice to set the record straight from a scientific and health perspective, and that’s where Danielle Russell, popularly known as Edible Dee, steps in. With the authority of someone who understands the chemistry of infusions, Dee is adamant: she advises against infusing processed foods with cannabis, as it creates a kind of biological contradiction. For her, processed sugar and industrial chemicals negate the plant’s therapeutic properties, creating a battle where “one heals you” and the other “harms you,” canceling each other out. It’s the yin and yang of the comedown: if food brings you down, the plant can’t lift you up.

“Adding a therapeutic compound to highly processed, sugar dense food doesn’t transform the vehicle into a health product.”

Danielle Russell, aka Edible Dee

“Adding a therapeutic compound to highly processed, sugar dense food doesn’t transform the vehicle into a health product,” she states firmly. Those premixed brownies you bought at the supermarket are shaking in their trousers. Her approach is to fully integrate organic ingredients and live rosin, arguing that true cannabis gastronomy is a form of medicine that only works when the vehicle is worthy of the substance.

Start Low, Go Slow

From the old continent, German chef Max Buechse rounds out the picture with a necessary dose of rigor for the home cook. Max debunks the idea that cooking with flowers requires laboratory-level logistics or massive quantities of weed. With that in mind, he assures us that the barrier to entry is minimal: you only need roughly what you’d use for a single joint.

His devotion to infused burgers shows that you can be a gourmand and satisfy your hunger at the same time, because they are “an edible and the munchies at the same time.” However, Max never tires of repeating the ironclad warning: digestion is a slow process that takes time, and an overdose due to anxiety is a direct ticket to discomfort. “‘Overdosing’ on cannabis food is a very unpleasant experience. So be careful and calculate the mg you plan on eating beforehand,” he concludes. Start low, go slow: you know the drill.

Here, then, lies the true revolution: the sovereignty of your own kitchen and your own grow. Between the mystique of the ritual, the freedom of pleasure, the organic purity, and the technical precision, it’s clear the modern cannabis menu is an expansive multiverse where a package of cookies (or, for that matter, chips) is just a single page in this new, extensive, and versatile culinary history. Still, aren’t chips delicious after a few good puffs? The palate can be educated, but the munchies ultimately rule supreme.