Bite Me The Show About Edibles
Helping cooks make great cannabis edibles at home.
Create your own tasty, healthy cannabis edibles and take control of your high life! Bite Me is a weekly show that helps home cooks make fun, safe and effective cannabis edibles. Listen as host Margaret walks you through an marijuana infused recipe that she has tested in her home kitchen or interviews with expert guests. New episodes every Thursday.
Bite Me The Show About Edibles
Good to Great - Cannabis Infused Chocolate Pudding
Ever tried to make chocolate pudding with an older electric stove and found it takes four times as long as expected? Join me as we tackle this exact challenge, turning a simple six-minute task into a 25-minute adventure. Inspired by Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat," we explore how chocolate pudding can be a beacon of joy and togetherness.
Find share tips on infusing your pudding with cannabis, offering a flexible recipe that caters to your palate with rich cacao powder and bittersweet chocolate. You'll hear humorous kitchen tales and insights into turning everyday cooking into a special occasion, all while diving into the heartwarming narrative of chocolate's unifying power.
Discover the secrets to crafting the perfect cannabis-infused chocolate pudding, balancing flavours and calculating dosages to make sure your dessert is both a treat and a revelation. I reflect on the peculiarities of cooking with older stoves and the little adjustments that lead to culinary success.
Celebrate the theme of chocolate through this rich, chocolatey episode, filled with laughter, kitchen wisdom, and the sheer joy of bringing people together through food and cannabis.
Visit the website for full show notes, free dosing calculator, recipes and more.
Welcome, friends, to episode 286, and today we are doing a bittersweet chocolate pudding. Welcome to Bite Me, the show about edibles, where I help you take control of your high life. I'm your host and certified gonger, margaret, and I love helping cooks make safe and effective edibles at home. I'm so glad you're here and greeting friends. Welcome back to another fantastic episode of Bite Me. I am super glad that you're here listening along with me. If you're listening to this and you're a big fan of podcasts, you're probably an audiophile like me, and I have to admit that when I learned that some people have YouTube podcasts, I almost never listened to them. I'm all ears, baby. So if you ever want to share anything with me, I am definitely all ears, and I love to hear from people who are listening to the show, and that includes you right now. If you're tuning in for the first time, you're in for a special treat, because we were talking about chocolate, and if you've been here for a while, I really appreciate your support.
Speaker 1:Now, last week, we sort of got into the subject of chocolate because I did an episode Big Bite where we focused on the ingredient of chocolate and sort of did a little bit of a deep dive, a big digestion. I don't know how many food puns I can throw in there, but if you haven't listened to that, then I encourage you to go back and check it out. And it just seems to be. We're in the month of February, as this is being recorded, and because February is home of Valentine's day, and think what you will about that particular corporate made holiday. It does seem to get people interested in chocolate, but today we're not doing chocolate in the conventional sense. This isn't really something you can gift like a box of chocolates, although I always encourage that kind of gifting because chocolate really does say if you're making something, chocolate, it really does say I'm thinking about you. But today I thought I'd do something that was maybe a little bit simpler, didn't require any fancy skills, any hard to find ingredients or equipment, and that's a bittersweet chocolate pudding.
Speaker 1:Now, before we get into that, I just wanted to recap you on some of the things that are going on. If you haven't checked out the challenge in the Bite Me Cannabis Club, I encourage you to do that. Every month I post a challenge of a certain kind. This one is fall in love with the little things, but these challenges are open to anyone. You don't have to be a member of the club in order to participate and I just have really been enjoying the types of things that people are posting in these monthly challenges. So if that's something that interests you, then by all means please check it out.
Speaker 1:And I feel like today's a good day I'm giving myself a little shake here a good day for a little stoner trivia. I'm in the mood for some stoner trivia, so I'm reaching from the deck because I always have this deck on my desk, because you never know when you need a little stoner trivia in your life and I'm pulling a card from the middle of the deck and what have we got? Oh, this one's a law related question. Fromoner Trivia what California state proposition legalized medicinal marijuana use? Proposition 215, proposition 40, or Proposition 420? I'll give you a second to think about that and to perhaps give a guess. Unless you happen to be from California or from the US of A, then you might have a better idea than some of those of us outside of it. But the question again what California state proposition legalized medicinal marijuana use? Proposition 215, proposition 40, or Proposition 20? If you guessed Proposition 215, then you would be correct. Congratulations, you are going to win nothing but except street cred, of course, because now you can say that you won the trivia question on Bite Me the Show about edibles when you tell all your friends about the show, because I'm hoping that together we can take over the world and change people's lives through cannabis, through edibles, through community, because I don't think there's any other way to do it at this point.
Speaker 1:Something else that can bring people together is, of course, chocolate. This bittersweet chocolate pudding recipe came from a cookbook that I've had on my shelf for a long time. It is called Salt Fat Acid Heat, and the author of this book is Samin Nosrat, and I apologize if I have not pronounced the name correctly. I first discovered this cookbook author through a Netflix short series, I guess, called Salt Fat Acid Heat, and each episode focused on each of those elements, and I learned quite a bit from that episode, or sorry, from that series, one of which and I still practice this to this day is to salt your meat ahead of time, because it really tenderizes it.
Speaker 1:But even if you can do it a day in advance, or the morning of, or even a few hours before, it can make a big difference in how your meat is going to turn out when you're cooking it. I do this almost all the time now and the difference is pretty remarkable, especially with certain types of meat. For instance, pork chops and pork tenderloin are two things that I have cooked many times over the years. That turn out very dry, very dry, very uninteresting, and a lot of people, of course, like to eat those cuts of meat with a little bit of a sauce or something like that. It's pretty common to pair it with a sauce, probably because it's so damn dry. But if you salt it it's going to turn out juicy and, like I said, remarkable difference. So that is one tool that I got from watching that series that I've never forgotten and I use to this day, and that was years ago now. I don't know if that series is still on Netflix. Maybe if you do a search you might find it. But the book is also excellent. It says here it's a New York Times bestseller, but there's a lot of great recipes in it and it has like a lot of cooking lessons incorporated into it as well. So if you want to sort of brush up on some of your cooking skills, then this is a great book as well. So my little PSA for this wonderful cookbook that has been on my shelf and over the.
Speaker 1:From time to time I do tend to do a purge of some of my cookbooks. Because I like cookbooks, I tend to collect them. I'll pick them up from thrift stores as well. I have several excellent cookbooks that I've picked up at a thrift store, but every so often you're like, ah, I'm like running out of shelf space and I have to get rid of them, and this is one of those books that I will keep. This one, the Joy of Cooking, is another one. Two books like. Joy of Cooking is like a compendium or an encyclopedia of cooking, just about. So if you want to know how to cook like cow's brains or whatever, then that's going to be in there somewhere. I'm sure of it, but I've never cooked that myself. However, it has helped me through many a turkey dinner, and I have now cooked Christmas turkey dinners in every which conceivable way. I digress the bittersweet chocolate pudding. Now I'm going to read the introduction that she gives to this pudding just so that you can sort of envision what it is we're going to be talking about here today.
Speaker 1:For years now, I've cooked a regular dinner series together with the bakers at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. We call it Tartine. After Hours, after the bakery closes, we push all the tables together and cook all of our favorite foods and then serve them to folks on big, beautiful family style platters. It's not very fancy, but we pour everything we've got into it. Sometimes around midnight, when we're in the middle of cleaning up, I'll realize I haven't eaten properly since breakfast. Looking around, I'm surrounded by pastries. As I'm invariably hot and sweaty after long days work, the only thing that ever looks good is a little bowl of chocolate pudding calling out to me from the glass-doored fridge. I'll find a spoon. Pull out a bowl of pudding and taste a spoonful, creamy and cool. It always hits the spot. One by one, the others will spot me and come over with their own spoons. A spot. One by one, the others will spot me and come over with their own spoons. Together, we'll silently finish the bowl and return to cleaning up. We always share just the one bowl. Somehow. This is one of my favorite parts of the night.
Speaker 1:Here's my slightly adapted version of the tartine recipe a little less sweet and a little more salty. Like tartine, though, I use Valrhona cacao powder, which makes all the difference. I love the imagery that she creates around the idea of this one bowl of pudding bringing everybody together. Everyone's all working on their tasks, cleaning up because they want to get home. It's been a long day and they've been serving food to others and then this one little bowl of pudding, unassuming, shared in its vision of deliciousness, brings everybody by with their spoon. Doesn't that sound nice? So we're going to be talking about this bittersweet chocolate pudding today. Now she does mention that she uses this particular type of cacao powder which I am not familiar with and I did not use because I used what I had on hand, which is a cacao powder in a glass jar, the package long since tossed away. I think any cacao powder will work Well.
Speaker 1:The recipe written in this book is beautiful and delicious. It wouldn't be Bite Me the Show About Edibles if I didn't take this beautiful recipe and elevate it. Now, the first thing that I had to do for this particular recipe. It doesn't really call for a traditional fat, if you will like an oil. So the ingredients are four ounces of bittersweet chocolate, eggs, half and half milk, cornstarch, sugar, cacao powder, salt. So most of the recipes that I'm often doing for this show are going to have something like an infused butter, infused coconut oil, and then it's pretty easy to make that integration, that infusion point, because you're just going to swap out some of your infused fat or oil for what's called for in the recipe, whether you're putting in all 100% infused fat or oil or whether you're doing a ratio, whatever is your preference.
Speaker 1:But this one was a little bit different. So what I decided to do was to infuse the milk. I haven't done that in quite some time, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to try it again and see how it worked out. What I did was well, first of all, I was generously gifted some Charlotte's Angel, which is a CBD dominant cultivar, from Brian out of Ontario, and Brian, if you're listening to this, thanks again for that. It was much appreciated. And he did recommend the CBD flower that he gave me be used for edibles specifically, and I was more than happy to comply specifically. And I was more than happy to comply. So what I first did was I, in few, I decarbed all the cannabis flower, all the CBD flower in my ardent because I just wanted to do the whole thing all at once and the ardent can hold up to two ounces Now. Of course I could do it in my oven as well, but I have an older roommate.
Speaker 1:If you have been following along with this show for a while or if you're just joining in for the first time, I live with my 93-year-old dad and while his sense of smell doesn't seem to be as acute as others, for instance, I have been growing a little bit of weed in the house, in a tent. I didn't have the fan with the charcoal filter running, and when some people came over around Christmas and family my sister specifically they noticed right away the smell of the weed and then I turned the fan on and it does it like the spell. They're like, yeah, huge difference. My dad has never said a thing about it, because I just don't think when you're 93, you smell as well as you did when you were my age or younger or whatever. I don't want to get old, I guess my oh, yeah, I've lost my train of thought for a second. The reason I was using the Arden, when I could, of course, do it in the oven as well, is because, well, I have an Arden, I might as well use it, but also it really keeps the smell down If I did it in the stove, the entire house would stink, for, you know, a while, and that's just something I don't want to hear any commentary on. Would he particularly care? No, but it's also being mindful of him as well. He's not really a cannabis user, so why put him through that? So I have the Artem.
Speaker 1:I used it. I did all the CBD flower one time and then I jarred and labeled the rest so I'd have it on tan for the next time. I wanted to make an infusion and then I used my Levo and this is the blessing of being an edibles podcasters have all these tools at my disposal. But I used the Levo to infuse some of the milk, and one of the reasons I chose the Levo in this particular instance is, even though it has some drawbacks, it does make dispensing. Oh shoot, I have to clean it out still. It does make dispensing really easy. So you just press a button and it dispenses into a container of your choosing, and what I used was five grams of the CBD flour to one cup of half and half milk.
Speaker 1:The recipe called for three cups of half and half, but I knew if I infused the whole thing, I would need a lot more cannabis to do it, and then it would probably be the taste would probably be too much the weed taste. Specifically, when I dispensed the infused milk from the device, you could smell the nutty flavor of the weed. What I did in the machine was 160 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours and that seemed to work perfectly well. If you had sous vide, a sous vide immersion circulator, that would also work well for this, because that would also you could put it right in a jar and do it that way. Then you'd have to strain afterwards, and you could probably also do this on a stove a stovetop version of this, where you would put your milk and cannabis in a jar and then put it in a pot of water, because I think you would want to heat this gently so that you don't scald the milk. That's the one thing that you want to be mindful of when you're doing a more delicate infusion like this one. I infused the milk and then I was ready to make the actual pudding.
Speaker 1:You may be thinking but I don't want to infuse the milk, I don't want to take those extra steps. Are there other ways that I can potentially infuse this? The answer is, of course, you could infuse the sugar. Now, if you don't have infused sugar on hand as it is, then that's a bit of a process. But you could also potentially use a concentrate or a powdered. What do they even call those? I don't even know. I actually have some in my cupboard right now. I keep forgetting about them because I don't tend to use them too much and I think they were from a while ago. So they have a slight edge of that distillate taste, which also means you're using a distillate.
Speaker 1:But you can get powders now that you can use to infuse things, and perhaps they've gotten better since I bought some, but I did find that they had a bit of that bitter edge In distillate. If you have enjoyed any cannabis beverages while they are also getting much better, a lot of them did have that like distillate aftertaste. Some of you out there might be nodding like yes, margaret, I know exactly what you're talking about. But I think a concentrate would also work very well for this and if you have one of those, if you have an RSO or a FICO on hand, you could also use that at the end of this recipe beautifully. So those are a couple of ideas for other infusion points if infusing milk has no interest to you, which I completely understand, and that's the beautiful thing about making your own edibles is that you are taking control of your high life and doing things how you want to do them. You are controlling the whole process, which includes how you're going to infuse your delicious recipe.
Speaker 1:Next we are cooking the pudding. Now it was actually a pretty simple process to make this pudding. However, I have realized as of late that perhaps my own setup isn't ideal, because there's a couple of steps. Basically, you're going to put the chocolate in a large heatproof bowl, and then you put a sieve over top of it and you set it aside. And then you also lightly whisk the eggs in another bowl and set that aside as well. And then you're putting the milk into a saucepan over low heat and then, once it just starts to come to a simmer emitting a little bit of steam, you don't want to let it boil because, as she explains here, when dairy boils, its emulsion breaks and its proteins coagulate. The texture of a custard made with boiled dairy will never be completely smooth. So I'm glad she included that, because that sort of explains why you don't want this to boil. So you're going to, as you're bringing that to a very light simmer. In another bowl you're whisking together your cornstarch, sugar, cacao powder and salt and then, once you do bring the milk up to temperature, you're going to whisk some of it into your powdered ingredients and then put it all back in the pot on the stove and then you mix this until it visibly thickens.
Speaker 1:In my particular instance, the book said use a rubber spatula to get it thickened about six minutes. I decided to do this at a time when I was also sort of getting dinner ready because like, oh, this would make a lovely dessert. But I think it's my stove. I've had this experience recently, but this did not take me six minutes. This took me more like 25. And I have to admit I was a little irritated by the time I was finished because this was supposed to take six minutes.
Speaker 1:So I think it really depends on your stove and as somebody who went from previously having a gas stove to an electric range that's probably I don't know how many years old 10, 15, who knows I just have to really adjust my expectations sometimes. So you know your stove and how long this might take. I've had this happen with another recipe. I was trying to do, where I'm trying to bring something up to a certain temperature and it's so damn slow that the sugar got burnt in the process. This is a recipe I've tried to make three times this other candy recipe and I realized it may be the stove that is the mitigating factor that will not allow me to successfully create this recipe, which I find endlessly frustrating. Now I do have a hot plate that I might try. I think it's a convection hot plate, so I may have to pull that out and see if I have better success with that, because for some of these recipes, a 25 minute time over the stove stirring to thicken something is a little ridiculous.
Speaker 1:But I'm sure anybody with a more up-to-date technology because, like I said, my dad tends to hang on to things for a very long time, as perhaps we all should, but sometimes technology changes. I will mention when I moved in with my dad. My dad has been living here by himself for, oh, seven years after my mom passed away and, uh, I brought a lot of kitchen stuff with me because I like to cook, I like to experiment in the kitchen. I've been making edibles for a hot minute and so I was making space for some of my things. I never I there are still things I've never unpacked because there's just not space for them. But I also took the opportunity to sort of tidy things up for him, because I hadn't been done in probably seven years. And when I tell you he had things in that kitchen that were there when I lived at the house as a teenager I am not kidding. I threw some things away. I was just like dear God, this thing is like 30 years old and it's like a scrub brush or something ridiculous like that. So I took the opportunity to clean out a lot of drawers. Now I digress Back to our recipe.
Speaker 1:So once it does thicken which will hopefully happen closer to your six minute mark than to the 25 minute mark that I experienced you're going to slowly add the two cups of hot pudding into your eggs while whisking, and then, once again, you pour all back into the pot and set it over low heat, and then you're going to be cooking it a little bit longer not for much longer, like one or two minutes at that point, of course, it took me a few more than one or two minutes and then you pour it over the sieve, you pour it into the sieve and into the bowl where your bittersweet chocolate resides, and you push it through the sieve and then the heat melts the chocolate and if you're going to use something like a concentrate, this is where you'd want to add it in, because it's just all going to be melding together and then you add it to a blender and mix it all up, or you can use a stick blender in your bowl, if you have one of those as well, and then you can taste and adjust the salt as needed. So, yeah, that is the perfect spot to add your concentrate, if that's what you're planning on doing, or your powders, or whatever it is that you choose, you opt for, and then that's it. You can serve it immediately. Now, I didn't serve it immediately because by the time I was done I was a little frustrated and needed to eat some actual, real food, but I did put it in the blender and mix it all up, and then I put it in the fridge and last night, when I was making it I think this was again because some of these things took so long it didn't seem super thick. I was kind of like is this the way it's supposed to be? But when I took it out of the fridge and I got out a spoon and I had a taste just before I recorded this episode, to make sure that everything was as it should be and it had thickened up considerably. It is a pudding texture and so it worked. I'm pretty happy about that. But I think you, my dear friends, would have a much different cooking experience than I did. So I was tasting it.
Speaker 1:There is a hint of that cannabis nutty flavor in this particular one, in this particular dish, because I infused the milk, which did confirm my decision to infuse only a portion of the milk and not the entire called for three cups. The flavor, the chocolate it's so chocolatey and so rich and it says it's bittersweet. There's nothing bitter about this, but it's also not like that cloying fake, overly sweet, sweet. It's perfect when you put it in a nice little dish and present it. It makes six servings, based on the figures in the book. You can refrigerate it, covered for up to four days.
Speaker 1:I suspect it may not last that long because it is really good and if you're somebody that does not like the cannabis taste at all, then perhaps choosing another infusion point might be better for you. But it was a mild flavor, not strong and, of course, because there is such a rich chocolate flavor, I really find that it doesn't mask it per se, but it does integrate it very well. So, as I mentioned earlier, I use five grams of flour and one cup of milk, and I decided to put this into my calculator because why not? I have a calculator on my website and I might as well make use of it, because I'm preaching about it all the time Actually, I do do that often but I decided to try it this way because I do have a tea check as well, but I don't know if the tea check will actually tell me the cannabinoid content of chocolate pudding. That is one of the limitations of a tea check. So it did give me the total per entire infusion, but per serving let's see. Per serving and like I said, it's a six serving recipe there was 8.68 milligrams of THC and 112 milligrams of CBD per serving. So even with only a 13% CBD content of the flour, it still delivers a pretty nice serving of CBD, which also a lovely way to unwind and enjoy your evening if you're having this, like as an after dinner dessert.
Speaker 1:And now it's your turn. I will be sharing this recipe, with credit, of course, to Samin Nosrat. I encourage you to try making this and share your creations with me. I would love to see what you come up with, how you decided to infuse it or maybe you chose not to infuse it for whatever reason. I would love to hear how yours turned out, and I hope to God it takes you less than six minutes to stir that stuff. But even if it doesn't, at the end of the day it was worth it. This pudding is delicious. You will impress your friends, impress your family, impress your loved ones. Thank you for tuning in, my friends. Don't forget, you can always head over to bite me podcastcom to use that dosing calculator. There's a lot of other resources over there as well. And please share this episode with another chocolate lover in your life. I'm thankful for your help and support in this manner. That's it for this week, my friends. I am your host, margaret. Stay high.
