Last fall, the food writer Laurie Wolf invited me to a dinner party at her home. It promised to be a master class in rustic entertaining. Wolf lives in a floating house on the Willamette River, just south of Portland, Oregon.

When she has people over, she told me, she has a few rules for herself. Wolf is sometimes called the Martha Stewart of edibles. The designation owes something to superficial similarities. At sixty-two, Wolf resembles a crunchier version of the domestic icon: But the designation also refers to her role as an educator, schooling people on how best to cook with marijuana.

Meet Brandon, a Medical Marijuana Edibles Expert in LA - Eater LA

Her recipes appear in all the major cannabis publications: High Times , Dope , and Culture , as well as the Cannabist, a Denver Post Web site devoted to the booming legal-marijuana industry. Oregon, where Wolf lives, legalized recreational marijuana in California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Maine. More than twenty per cent of Americans now live in states where recreational weed is legal.

But over the long term, proponents argue, the country is on a path toward legalization. There are other issues that have followed the same trajectory, like gay rights—all of a sudden you see the switch flip. According to the Arcview Group, a market-research firm, the legal-marijuana business in Canada and the United States did almost seven billion dollars in sales last year.

Arcview estimates that the industry will grow to more than twenty-two billion dollars by These profits have brought innovation. Cannabis can now be vaporized, absorbed under the tongue, or smoked in a hyper-concentrated form, a process known as dabbing. Edibles—a category that used to begin and end with the bone-dry pot brownie, served in a college dorm room—have been undergoing a particularly marked revolution.

The finer dispensaries in Boulder now sell cannabis-infused candy, breath sprays, spritzers, and savory foods, from bacon to smoked salmon. In Los Angeles, thrill-seekers are paying as much as five hundred dollars a head to have a cannabis chef cater multicourse meals, pairing different cannabis strains with their culinary complements heirloom-tomato bisque infused with a lemony Sour Diesel, for example.

All of this has produced a new category of cannabis user: Businesspeople see a future in which cannabis is part of a functional, even aspirational life style. Like Julia Child introducing Americans to French cuisine, Wolf serves as both a guide and an ambassador to this world. She was a chef and a food editor for many years, and she stands out as a source of reliable information in a nascent industry without dependable methods for cooking and dosing.

Evan Senn, the editor of the California-based cannabis magazine Culture , told me that, increasingly, foodies are the target audience for pot. I have the same approach to edibles. The rest of the Wolf family—which is also a kind of professional support team—congregated in the living room. Bruce made a joke about the family business: The event is one of many that aspire to be the Oscars of the legal-cannabis industry. Wolf gave me a preview of the meal: The dishes had been set out on a sideboard.

Next to each one was a card with the potency level noted in calligraphy: The secret to cooking with cannabis is fat. THC, the main psychoactive ingredient, bonds to fat molecules when heated. Wolf pulled a Mason jar of infused olive oil from a shelf and encouraged me to smell it.

It had a powerfully green scent. Wolf had used the infused olive oil to make the stuffed mushrooms as well as a spinach tart. Those who wanted even more weed could slather their food with an infused feta sauce made with olive oil, garlic, parsley, and red onion.

For palate cleansers, there were frozen grapes—an old standby for Wolf. The guests began to arrive. Zach Phillips, the Oregon State director of Dope , greeted Wolf with a hug, as did Amy Margolis. I like the patch a lot. Next came the Dope Cup judges: Max Montrose, Jeff Greenswag, and Jim Nathanson.

They work for a Colorado-based outfit called the Trichome Institute, named for the tiny crystal-like hairs that cover marijuana buds and leaves. Wolf ushered them into the living room, where smoking materials had been arrayed on the coffee table, including five cannisters with strains of marijuana from a local grower called 7 Points Oregon.

Montrose, a bearded redhead with glasses and a professorial air, sat down in front of the vaporizer. The marijuana industry, as a former black-market business, still lacks the governing bodies and institutions of, say, the wine world, a situation that the Trichome Institute is hoping to remedy.

In the dining room, the conversation turned, inevitably, to the subject of the Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who, in , shortly after the first licensed cannabis retailers opened for business, travelled to Denver and bought a cannabis chocolate bar.

Back in her hotel room, she ate part of the bar, and then, when she felt nothing, ate some more. I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain.

I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. Or even turn off the lights. Dowd later learned that she should have cut the bar into sixteen portions. The column sent shock waves through the industry.

Error (Forbidden)

Wolf was still furious about it. Nevertheless, the column brought up a hazard of cannabis edibles: Symptoms include hallucinations, panic attacks, and paranoia. Wolf admitted that this complicates the very idea of responsible dosing. Then there are three-hundred-pound men who eat one of our brownies, which have a five- to ten-milligram THC dose, and it wipes them out. Please drive me to the emergency room. But people can do dangerous things while under the influence. In one notorious case, in , a nineteen-year-old man jumped off a roof in Denver after eating a pot candy given to him by friends.

The state has since changed its packaging rules, mandating that products like chocolate bars be split into clearly marked doses of ten milligrams. Wolf advocates a cautious approach. If I want to go to sleep? One hundred and twenty milligrams. If I want to keep working? Four years ago, in her rookie phase, she and a friend consumed too much cannabis before a Halloween party.

She ended up accosting a partygoer who was dressed as a doctor and asking about a bunch of medical issues. She thought it was cinnamon toast. Nathanson, one of the judges, popped a stuffed mushroom into his mouth and groaned with pleasure. Montrose was devouring a frozen grape. Wolf, the younger of two children, grew up in Riverdale, a wealthy neighborhood in the Bronx.

Her father, a dentist, had anger issues. Good food was in short supply, as was good fun. One day, an administrator called to inform her parents that several girls were suspected of having smoked marijuana.

Her mother rightly guessed that Laurie was one of them. You let us down! After college, at N. In , she met Bruce, who turned her on to food styling, the art of preparing food for photo shoots. She started doing freelance magazine work, writing recipes for Self , New York , and Mademoiselle , then moved to the parenting magazine Child , where, for nineteen years, she wrote a monthly column on family-friendly recipes.

She woke up hours later, at home. She was given a diagnosis of epilepsy, and began taking the anti-convulsant Tegretol. It controlled the seizures, but left her with unpleasant side effects: Trying to get pregnant for a second time, she went off the drug periodically, which led to seven or eight seizures a week. In , Child folded.

The Wolfs decided to move to Oregon, seeking a change of pace. One day, when she was getting her car repaired, she struck up a conversation with a man in the service-station waiting room.

Wolf told him about her epilepsy and problems with Tegretol. The edible offerings were informal. She decided that she could do better. At home, she came up with a recipe for infused almond bars, using the powerful taste of the almond extract to mask the taste of marijuana. She sold them to local dispensaries, where they were a hit. You were supposed to eat only a fraction of the bar. Two of the early taste-testers were her son, Nick, and his wife, Mary. Growing up, Nick was not a marijuana user.

His mother was disappointed—which was probably the point. She met Nick while working in marketing for a financial firm in New York.

When Wolf began making her almond treats, she gave the couple a few samples, along with a cookie from another baker. They made the mistake of eating the entire cookie before deboning a chicken. The experience put them off edibles for months, and spurred Wolf to make a low-dose version of the almond bar, with only twenty-five milligrams of THC.

Nick and Mary eventually decided to follow his parents to Portland, where Mary began helping her mother-in-law with the company. She created a Facebook page and designed the logo, coming up with a whisk-and-marijuana-leaf motif. She has short blond hair and rosy cheeks. Mary only recently told her family in Oklahoma about the new turn in her career. He mixes it with dog food.

The day after the dinner party, Wolf picked me up in her car, a Kia Soul in a shade called kale green. Despite her affinity with the city, she still thinks of herself as a New Yorker, and seems to enjoy shocking West Coast sensibilities.

It has industrial-sized ovens, steel countertops, and a walk-in refrigerator with a vault door. Wolf opened a freezer to show me seventeen pounds of marijuana-infused butter. She and Mary made a fresh batch every week. Marijuana entrepreneurs bustled in and out. Wolf had given me a rundown of the legal-cannabis industry during our drive, dividing it into three broad categories. Then there are the profiteers: Wolf places herself in the last category, but she admitted that her heart is with the hippies.

She seemed troubled by the men of the Trichome Institute. She especially disliked a plan to regularize the grading system for cannabis. Wolf told me that she, like many other people, sees an industry at a crossroads. Down one path is a future that resembles the wine business, or the farm-to-table movement: Down the other is Big Weed: Wolf had already observed the corporate interests circling. She is now involved in several enterprises, including Badass Dabs, which makes concentrates and extracts.

She handed me a sample of her newest product: It looked like a large vitamin. She pulled a baking sheet full of pies from a cooling rack. I nibbled a small pie: In some ways, cooking with cannabis is just regular cooking, with a few adjustments for taste and technical considerations. An example is fried chicken, which she recommends topping with infused oil or salsa. In the early days, Wolf tried selling baklava at Oregon dispensaries, which baffled the medical-stoner crowd. Since then, the audience has changed: Wolf recommends having a bottle of infused salad dressing or pesto on hand.

The cannabis goes in the broth, mixed with sesame oil. At the end of the day, however, a great marijuana cook has to have a great pot brownie. They tried one from the back of a brownie-mix box and one that Wolf had learned at the Culinary Institute of America. Recipes from Martha Stewart, Mario Batali, and Julia Child faced off against pot-oriented recipes from publications like Edibles List and High Times.

They come in packages of five, which sell for twenty to thirty-three dollars, depending on potency. Wolf currently has them in thirty-five dispensaries and has developed new products: Ultimately, she hopes to conquer Oregon—and then to try for California.

Fields of cannabis foods. The Dope Cup was held on a Sunday. The Wolfs arrived at 10 p. A rap group, the Pharcyde, performed on a stage, and reps from marijuana businesses had set up booths. Wolf mingled with the crowd, which was mostly young and male.

He wrapped Wolf in a bear hug. Wolf returned the compliment. I recognized Montrose, who was wearing a white lab coat and instructing people on how to examine marijuana flowers under a microscope.

He had a joint behind his ear. Wolf seemed to have softened toward him. Soon, the awards ceremony began. A Dope employee with dark glasses and an Afro led the proceedings from in front of a table full of silver trophies. The Best Savory Edible trophies were distributed to a two-man team called the Baker Bois, which won second place for its hot pocket, and to a company called Cannavore, which won first place for its smoked salmon. A trophy for Best Sweet Edible, Medical, went to an outfit called Lunchbox Alchemy, for a grape-flavored squib.

Finally, the announcer came to the category of Best Sweet Edible, Recreational: When she returned, she was out of breath. But the fucking brownie! People just love it. And you will be high. Know your dose—overdoing it is never pleasant. Try a small piece, and give it several hours before eating more. Place the bittersweet chocolate in a heat-safe bowl over a pot of simmering water.

Melt over low heat while stirring. When melted, add the canna-butter and cocoa and stir well to distribute evenly. Remove the bowl from the heat but keep it over the warm water. Place the white chocolate in a second heat-safe bowl over another pot of simmering water. Melt over low heat, stirring occasionally.

Cover a large baking sheet with parchment. Immediately pour the white chocolate over the still-wet dark chocolate. Use a chopstick or a skewer to swirl the chocolates; so easy and so beautiful. Distribute the toppings over the still-wet bark. Allow to sit until set, about an hour. If you want things to happen faster, place in the fridge.

Break the bark into desired servings, and remember, with cannabis, less is more!

About 30 pieces, approximately the size of a matchbook. The THC content will vary depending on the potency of the cannabis. Lizzie Widdicombe is an editor of The Talk of the Town.

Sign up for our daily newsletter: Shop Sign in Link your subscription.

April 24, Issue. Every story about edible weed: She looked at him quizzically. Review By Richard Brody.

Can You Ship Marijuana Through The US Mail? - The Weed Blog

Elements On This Summer Solstice, Be Glad You Live on Earth By Alan Burdick. Listen to the New Yorker Radio Hour Buy the Cover Play the Jigsaw Puzzle. Culture Cultural Comment Culture Desk Goings On About Town The Critics Jia Tolentino Persons of Interest. Cartoons Daily Cartoon Cartoon Caption Contest Cartoon Bank. Magazine This Week's Issue Archive. Photography Photo Booth Portfolio.

Podcasts The New Yorker Radio Hour Political Scene The Writer's Voice Fiction Poetry Out Loud. More Customer Care Buy the Cover Apps Jigsaw Puzzle Secure Drop Store RSS Site Map. Newsletters The Daily Culture Review Podcasts Cartoons John Cassidy The Borowitz Report Fiction Goings On About Town.

About Us About Careers Contact FAQ Media Kit Press. About Careers Contact FAQ Media Kit Press. Your California privacy rights.