Anything That Moves (15 page)

The Smoking Gun costs $99.95 at Williams-Sonoma; Preston says together they sell ten thousand a year. To accomplish the pot-smoked chocolate course at Quenioux's dinner, Daniel and Nguyen went looking for something like it. At a head shop in the wholesale district, they found a poor-man's version, for fifteen bucks. It was disguised, no doubt to deceive Customs, as a vacuum for cleaning a computer keyboard.

•   •   •

A
s the technologies of Modernist cooking make their way into home kitchens, everyday American cooking is becoming more precise, complex, and refined. Products previously used for making paints, plastics, and cosmetics are becoming familiar ingredients, much as, two hundred years ago, cornstarch migrated from the laundry to the larder. “You'd be amazed how many people are using lecithin”—an emulsifier used in industrial food production—“at home to thicken sauces,” chef Will Goldfarb says. Goldfarb, an alumnus of El Bulli, the molecular gastronomy restaurant in Catalonia, has a website, Willpowder, where he sells high-tech cooking ingredients. “Meat glue has become pretty normal,” Goldfarb says. “We get a lot of questions from viewers of the Food Network.”

This extends to people who are cooking pot at home. Not long ago, I talked to a couple, let's call them Josh and Amanda. She went to cooking school in New York and interned at a three-star restaurant there. He was a fan of
Weeds
. When they lost their jobs in 2008, they thought they'd try making edibles out of their house in Los Angeles. Their idea was to produce fruit-candy-flavored THC-laced strips, similar to Listerine breath strips. “I was looking for a way to infuse oils and turn them into a stabilized solid,” Josh said. “I don't have a chemistry background, so we went down a cooking road. We came at it from a molecular perspective.”

Josh had given Amanda the Alinea cookbook for Christmas. Flipping through recipes for soy bubbles and smoke gel, they found one for “Spice Aroma Strips.” The recipe called for Pure-Cote B790, a “film-forming” starch manufactured by Grain Processing Corporation, which makes corn-based products for the pharmaceutical, personal care, and food industries. Pure-Cote lends a sheen to the surface of snacks and cereals and prevents chocolates from scuffing; it also constitutes the skin on some softgel capsules. At the time, the home-cook market for industrial food chemicals was just emerging, and Josh found himself cajoling big companies accustomed to ton orders into sending him one-pound samples. When they got their hands on some Pure-Cote, they found the results too brittle—glassy rather than pliant. Josh read that the chef Sean Brock, in Charleston, was experimenting with Ultra-Tex 3, which, according to the chemical company that makes it, is a “high performance cold water swelling modified food starch.” Pretending he was writing a cookbook, he corresponded with Brock, who led him to Ultra-Tex 8, which yields a pliant, paper-thin product. It became the secret ingredient of their “Medi-strips.”

A few years later, Josh and Amanda were both employed again, and they quit the business. Only a couple of close friends ever knew that they had turned the apartment above theirs into a grow house and candy kitchen, where, in addition to the strips they produced all-natural, organic, psychoactive fruit leather with produce from the Santa Monica Farmers Market. Spherification being a fundamental move in molecular gastronomy, they briefly considered making pot caviar, but were daunted by the stabilization and packaging challenge. No one knew about the disposable cell phones, the Russian gangsters, or the middle-of-the-night runs down the alleys in their neighborhood, dumping roots and leaves in other people's waste bins. They had become an ambitious, confident culinary team; they laughed when they read the recipe for fruit leather in Nathan Myhrvold's
Modernist Cuisine
, a six-volume set that aims to be the OED of molecular gastronomy. “We had cranked out a lot more of it than they had,” Josh told me. “Their approach was a bit basic.” For dinner parties now they serve deconstructed piña coladas with coconut strips, minus the THC, and make pineapple glass from Pure-Cote. The first time they ate at the Bazaar, a José Andrés restaurant in Los Angeles known for its effortfully whimsical take on molecular gastronomy (liquid mozzarella, cotton candy foie gras), it was with the proceeds of their molecular edibles business.

•   •   •

C
annabis has been used around the world for millennia. Chinese herbalists prescribed it for absentmindedness, and rich Romans ate roasted marijuana seeds for dessert. In the mid-1950s, Alice B. Toklas included a friend's recipe for hash fudge in her cookbook; it was slyly recommended as something fun to serve to your bridge group or at a chapter meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. “In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea,” the recipe read. “Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected.” As for sourcing,
Cannabis sativa
grows wild as a weed throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa; in the Americas, the closely related
Cannabis indica,
“while often discouraged . . . has been observed even in city window boxes.”

In California, marijuana has an ambiguous legal status. The state condones medicinal use, while the federal government prohibits it outright. To get fresh leaves for a cannabis pesto, Quenioux went to a neighbor in Highland Park who has a little patch. For the rest of the applications, he sent his sous-chef, Daniel, to buy an ounce of high-quality custom-hybridized marijuana from a grow house with a white picket fence in suburban Pomona. It was the equivalent of going to the farm to meet the people who grow your mache, rather than buying it at Whole Foods.

After the trip to the apothecary, the team gathered again, at Starry Kitchen, to plan the menu. Thi had put together a list of possible dishes. “So let's go over this,” Quenioux said. “Does the osmanthus have any medicinal properties?” he asked, looking at a description of a cake made with osmanthus and chestnut powder. Thi said it was good for digestion and headaches.

“I should ask my employees, 'cause they buy a lot of it—they all have medicinal cards—but how much
is
weed right now?” Nguyen asked. Daniel said his source would sell to him for $350 an ounce. “The higher potency lets off a better flavor,” he said. “The lesser stuff tastes like dirt.” The leaves, which are far less potent, would be good for salads and garnishes; the buds could be dehydrated and ground down to powders.

Quenioux proposed beef culotte with cannabis in place of rosemary, another sappy, resinous herb. “The whole idea is to really try to do a breakthrough,” he said. “Bringing cannabis and all those medicinal herbs from the apothecary side into food.”

“The fifth course will be ribs,” he went on. Ginger, wolfberries, sesame oil. He suggested confiting it in duck fat. “Oh, but it's twenty-two dollars a pound,” he sighed. He glanced over his right shoulder to a fountain where some ducks were swimming. Thi mentioned that they sometimes wandered into the restaurant. “Shit, you should have closed the door!” he said. “Maybe we can grab them at night.”

•   •   •

T
o the matter of taste: an experimental distiller I spoke to who once, after hours, ran a couple of loads of marijuana through his still to satisfy his curiosity, said, “It's a cross between hop tones—that floral, slightly skunky aroma—along with deep, musky sage tones.” He distilled it into brandy—the THC, which has an aggressive, tarry flavor, separated out—and tasted it: earthy base notes. “Then I put the sample away in the hope that someday the entire country comes to its senses,” he said. His tests with straight infusions yielded more dramatic results. He drank some with friends from Chez Panisse and, he says, “I found myself stuck to the floor ten minutes later. My math was way off.”

“Very vegetal, very green and bright, with just a little bit of bitterness,” a bartender who used to make drinks at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, a buzzy restaurant in New York's East Village run by the Korean-American chef David Chang, told me. The bartender, who doesn't serve his concoctions to the public, uses a rapid-infusion technique to make a smoky marijuana-mescal, double charging a canister of mescal and marijuana with nitrous. The first charge dissolves the gas into the mescal; the second forces the mescal to permeate the bud. When the canister is opened, releasing the pressure, the enhanced alcohol seeps back out of the plant. He's got a friend who pairs marijuana with gin and chartreuse for a lighter profile. “It's being done all over the country,” he told me. “It's so illegal on so many levels that no one talks about it openly.”

As with insect cuisine, marijuana edibles have traditionally been designed to bury the flavor, hence all the cheap chocolate. Among the avant-garde, the emphasis is on revealing its taste. T., a trained cook who several years ago started Tastebud, a pot-confectionary business with his then girlfriend, a pastry chef, uses high-grade E. Guittard chocolate to complement the earthiness of the marijuana, along with butter that sometimes costs more than the weed. “Berries and herbs have an affinity,” he told me, a principle he uses to guide the hard-candy flavors. (His assessment: cherry is delicious, sour apple's hideous.) “A pastry chef who had worked at El Bulli tasted my raspberry bars and went on and on about them, how the cannabis meshes with the butter, and the pastry's flakiness,” he told me. “To get praise from someone who worked at El Bulli—a
Spaniard
—that was amazing.” At the moment, T., who specializes in caramel “potcorn,” is trying to source mushroom popcorn—the round-popping variety that is the industry standard for caramel corn—that is non-GMO. The idea is to add an organic, GMO-free label to his packaging for the food-conscious customer.

To Quenioux, marijuana has a piney scent, with hints of kumquat. “I would compare the leaves to vetiver,” he said. Daniel detects grapefruit notes. “We wanted to showcase the flavor rather than mask it,” he told me. To capture the essence of cannabis in butter and in coconut oil, he fine-ground it in a coffee grinder and passed it through a sieve, reserving the crystals. Then he employed the classic ratio outlined in the recipe for “Space Butter”: a pound of fat to an ounce of bud. He cooked it slowly for half an hour in a bain-marie, carefully controlling the temperature, just as if he was making clarified butter for the restaurant.

“It reminds me of Almond Joy,” Daniel said, opening the jar of coconut oil, which was a pale, greasy green. It was late afternoon at Starry Kitchen, a few weeks before the dinner, and it was time to test the dishes. The day before, Nguyen had announced that Jonathan Gold would be attending. The restaurant was officially closed, but the kitchen, a tight galley equipped only with a few electric burners and a high-power toaster oven, was full of volunteers. Daniel took two large spoonfuls of the oil, melted it in a pan, and added monkfish cheeks. Suddenly the kitchen smelled of a Jamaican beach: pot smoke and Bain de Soleil. Quenioux dumped a container of pesto made from sorrel, spinach, garlic, and fresh marijuana leaves into a pot of congee, turning it grass-green, and spooned it into bowls. I tried a bite—rich and nutty with a light medicinal taste—and spat it in the trash. The cooks lined up. “You guys are going to have to let us know a few hours from now if you feel really stoned,” Quenioux said. “You have to eat the whole thing.”

•   •   •

T
he morning of the dinner, Quenioux walked into Starry Kitchen with a plastic tub filled with carefully washed marijuana leaves separated by layers of paper towel. He had just clipped them from his friend's patch. “Where's my soup?” he said, and dumped a twelve-gallon bin into a pot on the CookTek induction oven. “I always said I would never do consommé in this kitchen,
ever
. But I got pushed.” This one was made in the European way, with a
clarif
of wild boar, partridge, carrots, leeks, egg white, and onion, and, for the purposes of experimentation, ginseng (a blood-cleanser, in Chinese medicine) and
Angelica sinesis
(a woodsy, licorice-scented stalk, which is traditionally used as a uterine tonic). “These tastes are not recognized in people's brains,” he said. “They haven't developed the taste for it, and so we added kaffir and galangal to get people happy.”

Quenioux poured a handful of apricot kernels from the Chinese apothecary into a saucepan and covered them with consommé. They would confer a fresh, almondy flavor, but too many, Thi warned, might induce vomiting. “Date! I need date!” he said, and dropped nine red jujubes (for anemia) into the pan. The potential legal entanglements of the night ahead nagged at him. Nguyen, he said, had become nervous enough to get a medical marijuana card the day before, from “Doc 420,” a pot doctor with her own bikini calendar. “I say, ‘Well, Nguyen, are you concerned? Should I be concerned about something?'” Quenioux muttered, adding chunks of papaya to the soup.

A security guard with a walkie-talkie poked his head in the restaurant door, and everyone in the kitchen froze. A tall cook with glasses and a goatee, who was roasting a tray of partridge skins in cannabis butter, crouched down and peered through the pass-through. Daniel glanced up from a sheet of pastry he was basting, also with cannabis butter. Quenioux composed himself and went to talk to the guard. A moment later, he returned, giggling: someone had dumped trash in the wrong bin.

Quenioux melted more coconut oil on the stove, filling the kitchen with a rank, dizzying smell, and put a bowl of it on the counter. Out came the tapioca maltodextrin, a powder for making powder. He added it to the oil bit by bit, and slowly the substance in the bowl clumped. Passed through a fine sieve, it turned into a fluffy, flaky heap—pot snow, at room temperature. Daniel spooned it up and tasted it. “That's sexy,” he pronounced. “That's fucking cool.” Over the snow, he shook a little jar: the reserved crystals. “You have to treat it like a lady,” he said, tossing it gently with a fork.