Good to Great – Cannabis Infused Chocolate Pudding

Margaret 00:00:04 Welcome friends to episode 286. And today we are doing 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 Ganjier 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 audio file 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.

Margaret 00:01:07 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.

Margaret 00:02:14 And that's a bittersweet chocolate pudding. 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. And I feel like today is a good day. Giving myself a little shake here. A good day for 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.

Margaret 00:03:18 And what have we got? Oh, this one's a lore related question from stoner trivia. What California state proposition legalized medicine, medicinal marijuana use, proposition 215. Proposition 40, or proposition for 20. 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 are 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.

Margaret 00:04:31 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 Sammy Nazareth, 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 tenderize it. But even if you can do it a day in advance, or the morning of if 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.

Margaret 00:05:35 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 source. 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.

Margaret 00:06:31 So my little PSA for this wonderful cookbook that has been on my shelf and over 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, 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 or an Encyclopedia of Cooking, just about. So if you want to know how to cook, like cows, 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 and every which conceivable way I digress.

Margaret 00:07:20 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. 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 her favorite foods and then serve them to folks on big, beautiful family style platters. Ladders. 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 a long day's 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.

Margaret 00:08:18 It always hits the 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. Here is 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 task, 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.

Margaret 00:09:24 The package long since tossed away. I think any cacao powder will work. Well, the recipe written in this book is beautiful and delicious. It wouldn't be Bite Me to 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 actually 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 the what's called for in the recipe, whether that's whether you're putting in all 100% infused fat or oil, or whether you're doing a ratio, whatever is your preference. But this one was a little bit different. So what I decided to do was to infuse the milk.

Margaret 00:10:29 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. I'm Brian, if you're listening to this, thanks again for that. It was much appreciated. And he did recommend that the CBD flower that he gave me be used for edibles specifically, and I was more than happy to comply. So what I first did was I infused, I did 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 my oven as well, but I have an older roommate. 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.

Margaret 00:11:35 I didn't have the fan with the charcoal filter running, and when some people came over around Christmas and Some family. My sister specifically. They noticed right away the smell of the weed. And then I turned the fan on. And it just 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're 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 haven't 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.

Margaret 00:12:28 He's not really a cannabis user, so why put him through that? So I have the Arden, I used it, I did all the CBD flower at one time, and then I jarred and labeled the rest, so I'd have it on hand for the next time. I wanted to make an infusion. And then I used my levo. And this is the blessing of being a an edibles. Podcasters have all these tools at my disposal, but I use 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 use was five grams of the CBD flour to one cup of half and half milk. 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.

Margaret 00:13:24 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°F 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, and then you'd have to strain afterwards. And you could probably also do this on a stove, a stove top 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. You may be thinking, but I don't want to infuse the milk.

Margaret 00:14:23 I don't want to take those extra steps. Are there other ways that I could potentially infuse this? And the answer is, of course you could infuse the sugar. Now, if you don't have a few 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 edible. 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, 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. Well, they are also getting much better. A lot of them did have that like distillate aftertaste.

Margaret 00:15:13 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 ISO 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 whole life and doing things how you want to do, how you want to do them. You are controlling the whole process, which includes how you're going to infuse your delicious recipe. 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.

Margaret 00:16:21 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 and 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 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. 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 I thought this would make a lovely dessert, but I think it's my stove.

Margaret 00:17:31 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. 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, ten, 15, who knows? I just have to really adjust my expectations sometimes. So, you know, your stove and how long this might take. I I've had this happen with another recipe I was trying to do, or 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 realize 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.

Margaret 00:18:26 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, 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, 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 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 have 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 it hadn't been done in probably seven years.

Margaret 00:19:29 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 has been 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. 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 1 or 2 minutes at that point. Of course, it took me a few more than 1 or 2 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.

Margaret 00:20:29 And if you're going to use something like a concentrate, this is where you would 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 you opt, 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 needing 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 is again because some of these things took so long, it didn't seem super thick.

Margaret 00:21:22 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. 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 my decision to infuse only a portion of the milk and not the entire called for three cups. The flavor, the like 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. It's perfect when you put it in a nice little dish and present it.

Margaret 00:22:33 It makes six servings. Based on the figures in the book. You can refrigerate it covered for up to four days. I suspect it may not last that long because it is really good even. 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 in 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 this way because I do have a t check as well. But it. I don't know if the T track will actually tell me the cannabinoid content of chocolate pudding.

Margaret 00:23:35 That is one of the limitations of a t 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. 8.68mg of THC and 112mg of CBD per serving. So even with only a 13% CBD content of the flower, it still delivers a pretty nice serving of CBD, which is also a lovely way to unwind and enjoy your evening. If you're having this like as an after dinner dessert. And now it's your turn. I will be sharing this recipe with credit, of course, to seminar. 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.

Margaret 00:24:49 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 Podcast Comm 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 and thankful for your your help and support in this manner. That's it for this week, my friends. I am your host, Margaret. Stay high.