ON THE TABLE
The Beautiful Disaster of My Medicated Mozzarella Fail By Jessica Ashley Silva
onthetable@northcoastjournal.com
M
y reach has exceeded my grasp. I flew too close to the sun. Mistakes were made infusing what should never have been infused. And now the ghosts of three sad blobs of homemade mozzarella haunt me with the echoing thuds they made when I threw them into the trash. Let’s back up to give some context for this lunacy. A few months back I attended a virtual cannabis pairing dinner with Los Angeles-based Food Flower Future, cooking along as a chef live-streamed. Some of the cannabis-infused products we used created somewhat of a monster in me — a ravenous canna-monster. The product that did it was a cannabis and chili-infused finishing oil from Potli — it was gourmet and unexpected, a nice elevation from a standard cannabis-infused olive oil. It was all downhill from there. Under the banner of “research,” my friends and I bought every infused item we could find so we could flex our creativity in the kitchen together. Then came the Bong Appetit episodes. We went straight down a rabbit hole of YouTube infused-cooking videos and convinced ourselves we were now Michelin-level chefs capable of infusing anything and everything. We made infused olive oil, butter and sea salt. We used them on pasta, pizza and garlic bread. All delicious.
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NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, March 18, 2021 • northcoastjournal.com
The burger, though — the burger was the tipping point into madness. Canna-butter pooled in the patty, smothered by the melty cheese on top, and I wondered if the cheese was becoming infused during the baking process … infused … cheese? Eureka! Infused cheese! Clearly this is the best idea I’d ever had. I had always wanted to make homemade mozzarella, so why not make it cannabis-infused? My friend and I set out on a Saturday morning to procure everything we needed for our mozzarella-making mission. The North Coast Co-op was a bastion of good vibes, offering everything non-psychoactive we needed, from the rennet to the nut-milk bag to my favorite whole milk from Humboldt Creamery. It was all falling into place — this was going to be the best mozzarella anyone in the history of the Earth has ever made; we could tell. After prepping the flower by grinding it coarsely, spreading it on a baking sheet and baking it for about 30 minutes at 200 F, known as decarbing it, into the-nut milk bag it went. Then it steeped with the milk in a crockpot on high for an hour. Our first clue things had gone terribly awry was the color of the milk. After an hour of infusing, it was a pinkish brown. Perhaps it was a mistake using ground flower for our infusion instead of concentrate. I think I actually convinced myself the color would cook out somehow. Once we
