The secret to a lot of gourmet French cuisine is using enough butter to starve a calf. Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who cut his teeth in French restaurants, once said if you eat at any good restaurant, "assume you've eaten a stick of butter." Butter is also the base of edibles; just infuse some form of cannabis to it and it's ready to mix into your favorite treat. Brownies, cookies, chocolates and gummies are the staple Scooby snacks you find at dispensaries or made at home by hobbyist cannabis chefs, but I wanted something different — something that honestly has no business getting you high.
My editor and coworkers can confirm I've been pitching the same "gourmet edible" story whenever asked for ideas in our weed-related issues. Now, with two years under my belt as a Source Weekly reporter (very serious news guy), I've been given the green light and a little company cash to make this very dumb dream a very dumb reality. Here's how I did it.
Cannabutter
It all starts with the butter, and with legal weed it's much easier than that whole process you went through on your stovetop in college. I went to the dispensary and bought a syringe of full extract cannabis oil, and simply added a dose to melted butter called for in the recipe before putting it back in the fridge to harden. The recipe I'm using called for 2 tablespoons of butter as the base of the au poivre sauce, but I made 4 so I had a little extra to fry my steaks in.
The Steaks
Steak Au Poivre is surprisingly easy to make despite its popularity in fancy restaurants. It's just a pepper-encrusted steak and a cream sauce. If you're not familiar with best practices of pan-frying a steak here's a quick rundown of the rules: Let steaks sit at room temperature for a while before frying, pat them dry and season with salt well before other spices are added. For this recipe, which literally means pepper steak, the only other seasoning is course black pepper — and I mean really course, bash whole peppercorns for the best results.. Liberally add pepper on both sides and your steak is ready to go.
Next, put some oil on your skillet and bring it up to about 450 degrees. Before putting my steaks in, I added one tablespoon of my cannabutter to hopefully get me 1 tablespoon higher. Once it's down don't touch it, let it sear for four minutes on each side. Once cooked, put the steaks in tin foil so they can continue cooking as you prepare the sauce.
Au Poivre Sauce
Now that your steak is at a nice medium rare, turn down the heat on your burner and add in 2 tablespoons of your cannabutter, along with 1/3 cup of finely diced shallots. It'll take about three minutes for the shallots to brown and absorb a lot of that butter. Once that's done pour in a half cup of cognac and again wait for it to mostly evaporate and absorb into the shallots, again about three minutes. Finally, add in three-quarters of a cup of heavy crème and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. Stir thoroughly and wait for it to reduce to your desired thickness. Top your steak with it, and congratulations! You've made dank steak.
The Gourmet Edible Experience
I'll be honest, I'm not an edible guy. They take an hour to kick in, give me a weird anxious high and often just put me to sleep — I have not and will never figure out an appropriate "dosage." They also typically make delicious things taste worse, but since I'm such an incredible chef, or, because I used a flavorless oil, I avoided the earthy aftertaste some edibles have. I wish I had more to report about the type of high I got, but I went from "I think I'm starting to feel it" to passed out on the couch in a matter of minutes. It was so strong I had a lingering high all the way until noon the next day.
So what have we learned? We learned that cannabis butter can make me dumber for approximately 14 hours, that you can get high from all sorts of food and that I still don't really like edibles very much. Maybe I'll come around with a fancier dish.
