St. Louis restaurateur Ben Poremba shares recipes for marijuana-infused dishes

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The variety of medical marijuana edibles has grown exponentially in the year they’ve been available in Missouri, but sometimes medicating in the privacy of your home with a nice meal offers an experience you can’t get at your local dispensary.

When starting your cooking with cannabis journey, there are a few products that will allow you to easily infuse THC into your own culinary creations: THC-infused tinctures, butter or oil. Swade Dispensary, with five St. Louis-area locations, sells two tinctures: a 1:1 ratio with 100 milligrams of each THC and CBD, as well as a 1:10 ratio with 100 milligrams of THC and 1,000 milligrams of CBD. Swade does not currently sell cannabutter or oil; however, it is very easy to make at home using marijuana flower and your butter or oil of choice. The Swade website features a video explaining how infusion works, as well as printable recipe cards – visit swadecannabis.com/cookingwithcannabis for more information.

Swade also sells some of the latest kitchen tools that make creating cannabutter or oil easy as pie. “We sell a countertop machine called Levo that looks like a coffeemaker,” said Jack Haddox, director of dispensary operations. “You put your bud and your oil or butter in it and it does the whole process in less than an hour, including the decarboxylation [a crucial step that makes the THC bioavailable] and infusion.”

There’s another machine called Ardent, also available at Swade, which is similar to the Levo but goes a step further and can even bake your finished product. “That one is strictly for baked goods, so you might prefer the Levo if you want to infuse other foods,” he said. When making your own cannabutter at home, proper dosage can be tricky, so Swade recommends utilizing a THC percentage calculator, like the one at veriheal.com/edible-dosage-calculator/.

If you’re in need of some canna cooking inspiration, acclaimed St. Louis restaurateur Ben Poremba has partnered with Swade Dispensary to create a “cooking with cannabis” video, which features saffron risotto, coffee gelato and a peach-elderflower spritz mocktail with notes of almond.

“Cannabis lends some interesting flavors to dishes, but edibles are usually baked goods and things like that, so we wanted to do something healthier, trendy and more relevant – dishes that could easily be divided so the dosing is appropriate,” Poremba said. “The risotto uses infused butter, and the gelato and the mocktail both feature Swade’s amend. tincture, which is super easy to dose and use. The most important part is getting it from a reputable source.”

Each of the dishes featured in Poremba’s video make six servings with each serving having roughly 3 to 5 milligrams of THC. For more information and to view the videos, visit swadecannabis.com/cookingwithcannabis/.

This ad is intended only for Missouri medical marijuana patients. Medical decisions should not be made based on advertising. Consult a physician on the benefits and risks of particular medical marijuana products.