Enrique Olvera has been feeding his mole madre for years, replenishing the fine mix of black, red and green chilhuacle chiles with seasonal seeds and fruits for a complex, ever-changing flavor base.
Olvera is among many chefs lately teaming up with cannabis brands to bring a more epicurean edge to the edibles market, a smokeless industry that’s seen an increase in sales since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
— most recently resulted in his pastry chef, Huerik Palos, flying to the Bay Area with a container of the mole madre.
Rose co-founder Nathan Cozzolino says Olvera has hit him with several inspiring ideas: What if he could replicate a michelada, but trade the bitter edge of beer for the bitter, herbal taste of cannabis, then dust the cube-shaped THC edible with freeze-dried celery powder and salt? Or re-create the flavor of mezcal-poached pears, coated with ancho chiles.
As a chef, the possibilities are seemingly endless; as a consumer, the brand’s limited-run Delights, which texturally fall somewhere between a jelly candy and Turkish delight, offer new collaborations every few months.
“A lot of the product in the space is thought of once and then produced a million times.
chefs and confectioners such as Fat & Flour’s Nicole Rucker, who used apricot, poppy and lemon verbena in her CBD cubes, or haute jelly-cake maker Lexie Park of Nünchi, whose THC cubes have blended yuzu and Chino strawberries with coconut milk.
The ingredients are combined with a taffy-like flower rosin — the result of hydraulically pressing cannabis blooms sourced from the house farm and others, a bid to support small, family-run farms on every level.
Given California’s role as one of the country’s chief agricultural producers as well as one of its largest cannabis cultivators, it may seem surprising that the industries weren’t widely conjoined promptly after 2016, when the state legalized recreational cannabis.
Kiva, a larger edibles company that offers chocolate bars, mints and gummies, sells infused chocolate bars year-round, but for 4/20 it plays into stoner tropes with the chocolate Munchies Bar and such ingredients as Fruity Pebbles and potato chips, typically created by its in-house development team.
Kiva’s edibles are stocked in more than 720 dispensaries across California, but for a limited-run product like this, Miller estimates it can be found in roughly 200 — or ordered online through Kiva’s website.
chef-restaurateur, and it came about as organically as one might imagine: After taste-testing Kiva product, members of Kiva’s marketing team satisfied their own munchies at the food truck parked in Silver Lake.
“There’s always been that thing of ‘cannabias,’ ” he says, adding that Kiva is always open to collaboration.
Sayegh has been studying the medicinal uses of ingesting cannabis for roughly 10 years, gradually shifting his career goals from becoming a doctor to a chef focused on incorporating preventative medicine into his food.
It’s so concentrated with CBD that to achieve 50mg per portion of baked goods such as brownies, the addition of the liquid won’t throw off the ratio of the recipe.
Previously, she served as the restaurants and bars editor for Time Out Los Angeles, and prior to that, the award-winning food editor of Richmond magazine in Richmond, Va.