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The culinary avant-garde and the marijuana underworld have lately become intimates. Increasingly, their equipment is interchangeable. Over the years, the Chicago chef Grant Achatz has experimented extensively with scent. Achatz, whose restaurant Alinea has three Michelin stars, is trained in molecular gastronomy, the steaming-beaker approach to cooking used by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in Catalonia, where Achatz worked briefly. Borrowing chemical stabilizers, thickeners, and gels from industrial food manufacturing, molecular gastronomy—also known as Modernist cooking—seeks to subvert the diner’s expectations delightfully, using all five senses. Achatz is the most romantic of the molecular gastronomists. A Pre-Raphaelite among Dadaists, he once put dry ice in a vase with charred garlic, rosemary, thyme, and black pepper: cookout fog. Another time, he leaned hot stones against a live tomato stalk, to conjure the quintessential summer smell of walking in the garden in the morning and brushing up against tomato leaves. In 2005, right before he opened Alinea, one of his investors suggested he check out the Volcano, which he had seen while traveling in Amsterdam.
The Volcano is a squat metal cone-shaped heater with a filling chamber for “plant material,” a digital panel displaying the precise temperature, and a large plastic balloon to capture the plant’s vapor. Its traditional use involves fitting a mouthpiece to the air balloon and inhaling. The Volcano’s manual recommends using it with chamomile and lemon balm. “We could see it would have the ability to pump out a lot of scent and vapor and capture it,” Nick Kokonas, Achatz’s business partner, told me. “It worked perfectly, from a culinary—and from a theatrical and emotional—perspective.”
In the years since, Achatz has vaporized grass, oak leaves, and hay. “My favorite is to trick people into thinking they’re eating something that’s not edible,” he says, such as, for instance, venison with leather aroma. His signature vapor is lavender, which he serves in a plastic balloon covered in Irish linen, under a bowl of yuzu pudding, ham nage, and gooseberry coulis. Before presenting the dish, the waiter punctures the bag of lavender air with a syringe in a four-by-four grid, so that the weight of the bowl releases the scent. At Alinea, Achatz’s molecular cocktail lounge, the bartenders use it for the Rob Roy, which comes to the table in a plastic bag filled with lavender air. As the waiter cuts it open with scissors, it looks and smells like a new-age spa treatment. (I had a virgin one; the toasted-lavender smoke formed a film over the flavor of the deep red juice—the smell of a glamorous grandmother, covering up her snuck cigarette with eau de toilette.) When the Alinea cookbook came out, the Volcano was listed on the equipment page, along with agricultural syringes, a paint-stripping heat gun, and a refractometer for measuring sugar content in Brix. The four Volcanos in the Alinea kitchen are named John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
U.S. Customs prohibits the importation of anything used primarily as drug paraphernalia. A few years after Achatz’s discovery, Customs launched an inquiry into the Volcano, which is made by Storz & Bickel, a German company. Adam Schoenfeld, who imported and marketed it, was at the time in his twenties and had recently graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. “I flew around the world, I did this, I did that, I went to Thailand, I discovered the Volcano, I ate lots of cool food, I designed my own curriculum around travel and business,” he told me. When Adam, whose father is the New York restaurateur and dumpling impresario Ed Schoenfeld (Chinatown Brasserie, Shun Lee, RedFarm), found out that Achatz had a Volcano in his kitchen, he sensed an opportunity. He sent vaporizers to technically experimental chefs like Wylie Dufresne, Dave Arnold, and the pastry-maker Johnny Iuzzini. “It was about expanding the usage,” Schoenfeld said. Customs eventually relented, determining that the Volcano could be used as “a device to aid in a method used in modern cooking called ‘molecular gastronomy.’”
“The Volcano is a multipurpose vaporization device,” Schoenfeld told me one day. We were in his apartment, a walk-up in the flower district in Manhattan. He was pale and damp-palmed, with tortoise-shell glasses and purple-and-black Adidas sneakers. I sat by the window so that I could breathe. “The premise is that you use heat to gently extract the flavors, essential oils, and aromatic compounds,” he said. “You can vaporize oils, plant materials. It is not sold for marijuana.” Nevertheless, he has learned that when sending to restaurants he ought to send two if he hopes the Volcano to be used in the kitchen. “Almost inevitably, one makes it back to someone’s living room,” he said. Kokonas said there had never been an issue of theft at Alinea. “Using the Volcano is not a rock-and-roll-TV-chef thing,” he said. “It’s a Michelin-three-star-chef thing.”
Representatives from Storz & Bickel have done demonstrations at the National Restaurant Association Show, in Chicago, and at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, where they trapped cinnamon-and-clove-scented vapor under a glass cloche and served it with tangerine slices. “It was a holiday scent,” the representative told me. “Like spicy cookies.” He was just getting used to the expectations of his new milieu; someone let him know he needed to wear a white coat and maybe a hat. Last year, Storz & Bickel made a presentation at Mandy Aftel’s house in Berkeley. Aftel, a Berkeley perfume-maker who lives behind Chez Panisse in a bungalow permeated with the restaurant’s kitchen smells, recently released a line of essential oils for chefs. To the presentation, she invited the chef Daniel Patterson and the food writer Harold McGee, and they vaporized marjoram—which had unexpected bubblegum notes—and bacon.
The laboratory equipment firm PolyScience started making culinary equipment a decade ago because Philip Preston, the company’s president, is a foodie. Working with the chef de cuisine at Charlie Trotter’s, a pioneering Chicago restaurant that recently closed after twenty-five years, he developed an immersion circulator that became the industry standard for sous-vide, a way of cooking meat slowly at a low temperature in a water bath. Then he made the Anti-Griddle freezing plate for Achatz. PolyScience also makes the Smoking Gun, a handheld tool with a chamber for burning aromatic woodchips and a tube with a nozzle attachment. Preston, who invented it, says that, in spite of appearances, the idea came not from a misspent youth but from seeing a keyboard cleaner at a computer store. “I’d been keen on adding cold smoke flavor,” he said. “I thought, if I unscrewed this bit and screwed this bit, I could turn it into a smoker.” When he got home, he pulled the screen out of a faucet and made a bowl out of a plumbing fixture, and sent the prototype to Dufresne, who cold-smoked lettuce with it. “Then everyone wanted one,” Preston said. “Grant, Wylie, Jean-Georges, the Voltaggio brothers, Thomas Keller—you’d be hard-pressed to find a really high-end chef not using it.” He went on, “It’s one of those things that people look at and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what else you could do with that.’”
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.
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As 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 hom
e. 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.
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Cannabis 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.”
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To 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.”
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