Our New Cookbook ‘Bong Appetit’ Is Available for Preorder

People have been eating weed for thousands of years—brewed for tea, crumbled into coffee, as a tincture, mixed with fruits and spice in jam—but in the last decade or so, cooking with weed has started to feel, look, and taste very different. Building on the accumulated wisdom of traditional recipes such as Middle Eastern mahjoun and Indian bhang, cannabis cuisine has gone far beyond brownies and has reclaimed its place as a serious culinary ingredient. We’re living in a new era of marijuana cuisine; one of space-age vaporizers, designer hash, and cutting-edge science—all of which have helped take weed food to a whole other realm.

In our new book Bong Appetit, we’re experimenting with weed, but not like teenage stoners hitting a homemade gravity bong. (Although there’s a time and place for that.) Instead, we’ve enlisted some incredible chefs to make weed food that eclipses those early brownies—the kind of fare that you’d want to sit down and eat even if there wasn’t weed in it. (Which you can—the recipes in this book can be followed without including any cannabis at all, they’re just not quite as fun.)

We realize that many readers, even those who live in states such as California and Colorado where recreational cannabis is legal, won’t have access to luxury, tailored cannabis products such as fine flowers, rare hashes, infused oils, and weed-infused spices. With that in mind, we’ve translated many high-end weed cookery ideas and techniques into something that works for the home cook. Do you have access to terpenes, cannabinoids, distillates, tinctures, and any strain of bud you desire and are looking for new techniques that will put them on your home table or turn them into professional-level edibles? The recipes will give you plenty to work with. Do you have to text someone shady as hell to get hooked up, so you basically have to work with whatever you can get? There are recipes for you, too. And we’re making it easy to know just how high you’ll get from a plate of fried chicken wings or a bowl of pappardelle Bolognese. We lab-tested all of our recipes to make sure you wouldn’t have to worry about (a) wasting a bunch of weed making food that doesn’t get you high or (b) making food that gets you so high you have to call in sick for work the next day.

And sure, there’s some crazy shit in there, like poaching a whole octopus in weed olive oil or force-infusing THC into alcohol with a whipped-cream charger. But we’re also keeping it simple enough for the beginner cook to play along, with cannabis getting into most of the recipes via easy-to-make infusions of butter or oil. Still, if you’re itching for a challenge, you’ll find plenty of next-level options, from cannabis-leaf kimchi to infused pepperoni.

If you live in a place without legal weed, please know we’re sorry—and that you are not alone. And, yes, it’s incredibly fucked up that there are millions of people in prison for enjoying the kind of recreational activity we wrote an entire book on, and we’re doing work to change that soon too.

Anyway, the book’s coming out in October from Ten Speed Press, and you can jump on the preorder by clicking here. While you’re waiting, catch up on your favorite moments of weed-fueled eating and drinking from Bong Appétit over on VICELAND.