The spacious kitchen of a rented house just off Melrose Avenue in Beverly Grove is in full 420 mode. The stovetop is dotted with Le Creuset cookware. A peppercorn-studded prime rib rests on the counter next to an apothecary jar full of weed. And two videographers and a boom mic operator capture the action as three chefs plate hamachi crudo topped with a Szechuan mala sauce infused with Sonoma Hills Farm’s cherry cheesecake cultivar and top cannabis cocktails with crunchy bites of spiced fried eggplant glazed with fish sauce.
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Out of the stoveside scrum steps a 30-something giving Audrey Hepburn vibes in a red shirt dress, pot-leaf print apron and a relaxed updo held in place with a white plastic clip. “We invited Chef Wendy [Zeng] and Chef Doug [Rankin] to come and cook for us,” Vanessa Lavorato tells a table of 10 dinner guests. “And we’ve got something to celebrate!”
Lavorato is the L.A.-based founder of Marigold Sweets (a line of sea-salt-flecked, THC-infused toffee caramels sold in local dispensaries), creator of “The Edibles Club” online cannabis cooking show and a recipe developer/brand ambassador for the Everclear alcohol brand. (Although the Everclear gig isn’t cannabis-related, there’s some synergy since the high-proof hooch has long been the go-to spirit for making infused tinctures.)
She’s feeling celebratory because this dinner party is being filmed as the pilot for a potential Vice Munchies reboot of “Bong Appétit,” the James Beard Award-nominated cannabis cooking show she co-hosted for three seasons.
Thoroughly blend equal parts hard science and kitchen skill. Add a responsible amount of weed and sprinkle enthusiastically with real-life experience. The result is a guide to cooking with the devil’s lettuce that’s flavorful, fun and fear-free.
(Julia Stotz)
Along with that, she has something else worthy of celebrating: Tuesday’s publication of her cookbook “How to Eat Weed and Have a Good Time: A Cannabis Cookbook” (Simon Element), the 256-page, lavishly illustrated culmination of a decade and a half of efforts to make cooking with — and consuming — the devil’s lettuce equal parts flavorful, fun and fear-free.
The “fear-free” part of that might not make a lot of sense unless you’ve accidentally overdone it on cannabis edibles or been responsible for someone else’s bumpy ride. As Lavorato memorably recounts in the book, she has done both: inadvertently doing herself in by way of an infused apple pie on one occasion and on another, an ex-boyfriend courtesy of a cross-contaminated paring knife.
“I started [cooking with cannabis] in 2010 [the year she founded Marigold Sweets], so that’s 15 years of dosing myself and dosing other people,” she said. “So I’ve seen a lot.”
That’s why whether she’s hosting a “Bong Appétit” dinner party, interacting with her more than 103,000 social media followers (97,400 on Instagram and another 5,600 on YouTube) or hosting a twice-weekly livestream sesh for her canna-cooking-curious Edibles Club, she makes sure those about to munch on infused foodstuffs from meatballs to Bloody Marys and cookies to queso know just how much psychoactive THC they’re about to ingest.
Cookbookwise, that means before presenting an assortment of easy-to-make toothsome recipes, there’s some science about the plant to learn. This includes how to prepare it for use in the kitchen (raw cannabis flower needs to be heated to a certain temperature — a process called decarboxylation — to make it psychoactive) and how to prepare what she calls the “mother infusions”: cannabis-infused butters, oils, alcohols and milks.
In a cooking demonstration video, Lavorato whips up a corndog batter using an oregano tincture made with Everclear. She explained that adding high-proof alcohol to the frying batter helps prevent grease from seeping in and results in a crispier texture.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
As Lavorato acknowledges, one of the biggest challenges when it comes to cooking with the plant is knowing how much of the high-making magic one is consuming. To help establish reliable dosages of THC in her recipes, she worked with two local testing labs, Pasadena-based Encore Labs and Caligreen Laboratory in North Hollywood, conducting more than 200 tests along the way.
All of the recipes in the chapters that follow are built on those mother infusions and are organized by type: beverages, hors d’oeuvres, sauces and dips, drinks, snacks and the like. The final chapters focus on pulling it all together, suggesting ideas for entertaining and gifting based on this newly learned cornucopia of comestible cannabis knowledge.
Making the infusions requires very little beyond what’s already in your kitchen (you’ll find having an accurate digital scale, some cheesecloth and a roll of parchment paper helpful), and most of the recipes can easily be dispatched by anyone who knows their way around the kitchen.
In addition to the recipes themselves, you’ll find some eye-catching, color-popping images styled by Casey Dobbins and photographed by Julia Stotz (think floating meatballs, thrice-baked potatoes lounging on a tiny couch and pot-leaf-shaped shadows). The book also includes Lavorato’s own story, a brief history of the magical plant and a primer on why bongs and brownies hit differently.
The end result is a “Joy of Cooking” for the kitchen cannathusiast that’s the perfect launchpad for all kinds of herbal adventuring.
In advance of the book’s publication, I recently caught up with Lavorato (whom I first met almost a decade ago after falling in love with her infused confections) to talk about those 200 lab tests, her concept of ethical dosing, L.A. inspiration and rookie mistakes. Here are some excerpts from that conversation.
You launched the Edibles Club out of your Echo Park kitchen in 2020 — the same year you started this book project. Are the two related in any way?
The Edibles Club has about 600 members now. They really helped me figure out what I wanted to say and what recipes really clicked. It was a way for me to to understand who my audience is. A lot of the questions they asked are answered in the book. That’s why I dedicated it to the Edibles Club — and to everyone who enjoys eating weed.
Was there anyone in the cooking or entertaining space who inspired the way you approached this book?
The idea of putting together the various recipes and then putting together a party using those recipes came directly from Martha Stewart’s first book, “Entertaining.” I have a lot of respect for what she does and how her books are put together. They’re so in-depth and specific; she’s really trying to solve problems for people at home. And that’s exactly the [approach] I was going for with this book. I kept asking myself: “What would Martha do?”
When it comes to cooking with weed, what’s the biggest rookie mistake people make?
It’s dumping too much weed into the butter. People think, “Oh, I can smoke an eighth [of an ounce] a day,” so that’s what they’ll use. But what they don’t know is that we waste a lot of THC when we smoke. And also that 11-hydroxy-THC [which is a result of metabolization through the liver] feels a lot stronger than Delta 9 [THC].
The cookbook author, maker of THC-infused chocolates and (non-weed-infused) recipe developer for Everclear gives a cheesy corn dog a taste while shooting a cooking demonstration video in the backyard of an Elysian Park home recently.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Which brings me to the concept of “ethical dosing” that you mention in the book. What exactly does that term mean?
The main issue with a lot of food is the serving size. When you get a bag of chips and it says on the bag that there are five servings and each serving is three chips, who is eating three chips? Nobody. And that’s how you have to think about edibles. You need to dose them [low enough] so people can eat with grace. You have to think, “How much of this is someone going to eat?” I want to be able to socialize with my friends, still be able to talk to them. That’s why I try to have [recipes with] micro doses. … I’m really adamant about everyone knowing exactly what they’re getting. You want to avoid anyone becoming what I call a “cookie casualty.”
You point out in the book that you conducted over 200 lab tests while working on these recipes. What were those tests trying to accomplish?
When someone says, “It takes this long to infuse butter,” my first question is: “Well, how do we know that?” I really wanted to know. So I worked with a lab to figure it out. And that’s how we ended up doing over 200 tests.
[Cannabis] is an ingredient, and I wanted to educate people [about] how to use it responsibly. What exactly are you trying to accomplish when you’re infusing butter? The answer is you’re trying to wash off the trichomes [on the surface of the plant material]. You’re just trying to wash it off. That’s it. You’re not trying to pull all the green out of the plant. Once people know what they’re actually doing and what they are trying to accomplish, it takes the mystery out of the process. It’s not that complicated.
Since you’ve lived in Los Angeles for 13 years, I’m curious if there’s any specific L.A. influence that made its way into the book?
Yes! My [infused] salsa verde is inspired by the one at Taco Zone. It’s a little taco truck right by the Vons [grocery store] on Alvarado [Street] in Echo Park.
Now that your five-year-long project of working on “How to Eat Weed and Have a Good Time” is done, what’s next on the horizon?
I’m already thinking about some ideas. I’m a cannabis chef. I could do an Italian cookbook or a chocolate cookbook. I have more to say about cooking with cannabis. There are more science experiments to be done. Maybe for my next book I’d look at it through the lens of health and day-to-day lifestyle.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
