Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Cooking with marijuana, part 1 (as requested by Luke)

For many, cooking with marijuana (an illegal substance, mind you) presents an extremely daunting task. After all, how does one go about in properly infusing food with the chemicals that get you high with the most minimal amount of waste? The answer is simple.

Disclaimer: marijuana is illegal and should not be used or cooked with by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

In order to make food with weed, one must first extract the THC (the stuff that gets you high, maaan) from the plant. Since THC is a fat soluble compound, it can only be dissolved in fats or fat solvents. Therefore, the solution is obvious: dissolve the plant in butter or oil.

Most people at this point would throw butter or oil into a small pot, throw it over the stove, crank up the heat, and throw in their herb(s). The bud will sizzle and then eventually turn black. At this point, the oil or butter has indeed been infused with mind-altering properties. The burning of the organic matter means that it has combusted and, for those lawbreakers who smoke marijuana, combustion is a very reliable means of extracting THC. However, for our purposes, this means that the oil produced will taste like complete shit. After all, the oil now contains the herb in carbon form, after it has released (along with its THC) all its byproducts of combustion.

How, then, does one extract the THC without burning one's valuable plant matter? The answer is vaporization.

Vaporizing is the process of releasing the THC from the plant material without combusting it. This means heating of the plant matter to a temperature above its vaporization point and below its combustion point. In order to achieve this, the oil must be heated to about 180-200 degrees Celsius and not to exceed 220 Celsius.

How you get and maintain the oil or butter in this temperature range is up to you, be it with a candy thermometer or an infrared thermometer (recommended). After about 20 minutes or so, cool and then strain the oil with some cheesecloth, wringing it to get as much oil as possible, and dispose of the solids. You have now have oil or butter that you can use in whatever recipe you wish. Sky is the limit (so to speak)!

Luke Burger loves the coq

Coq au vin (pronounced cock o van, I'm told) is French for rooster with wine. Although traditionally prepared with rooster, chicken works just fine and is more readily available.

Chicken parts are marinated overnight in wine and veggies and then braised in its marinating liquid which makes for wonderfully flavored and tender meat that falls off the bone.

Coq au vin

A word of advice: the recipe calls for one bottle of wine, but you had better use two. One is not nearly enough to submerge all the chicken.