Chefs and culinarians agree: Always use the finest ingredients, even if those ingredients aren’t what one would call garden variety – so to speak.
Just ask director of culinary at Proper Cannabis, Chef Dave Owens, whose confections are based on premium ingredients, including the cannabis grown from seed, harvested and distilled locally by Proper Cannabis.
Proper Cannabis has positioned itself as the region’s premium cannabis dispensary, offering an elevated quality of flower and edibles. The reason the company brought Owens onto its team, taking advantage of his extensive experience as Bissinger’s former chief chocolatier and vice president of taste.
“It’s a new chapter for me. Something interesting and different,” said Owens, who began his career as a prep cook for legendary restaurateur Bill Cardwell, and worked his way up as a chef and partner to Cardwell’s on the Plaza. After his stint with Bissinger’s, Owen reached out to Proper Cannabis, expressing interest in edibles.
“I thought this would be a good place to be. And I could still be making confections,” he added.
Once the connection was made, Owens began working with the company. After a few weeks, he developed 30 ideas for chocolate bars and real fruit gummies for consideration.
“They had some ideas of what they wanted, but they needed some refinements,” he said. “After we talked, they agreed with my approach, which was simple: Everything should taste great. That has always been my focus. It always has been about flavor. It has to taste good and be exciting to consume. For us, that’s a fine chocolate bar or gumdrop with real fruit that just happens to have THC or CBD.”
Owens’ job is to develop and make sure everything tastes great while staying on point with the THC/CBD additions. It’s tough making medicine taste good. It has been the challenge apothecaries have grappled with for centuries. And it’s not easy, especially when working with cannabis. Let’s face it, edibles have the reputation of tasting awful.
“If it tastes awful, people won’t want it. To address that issue we’re using a distillation. That’s a 90% concentrate distilled from the cannabis, much like you do when you make liquor. As a result, it doesn’t have the fast lipids or chlorophyll and all the other things that can make edibles taste hashy or green,” he said. “After distillation it looks like a thick concentrated honey. It doesn’t have the grassy taste, and it doesn’t effect the tempering of chocolate or the texture of gummies.”
Honeybee, perhaps a nod to the honey product distillation, is the brand name for the Prober Cannabis’ confection edibles – the chocolate bars and gummies created by Owens; a brand, which to date, includes six difference flavors each of chocolate bars and gummies. All feature chef-driven flavor combinations, such as Caramelized White Chocolate, and the exotic Blood Orange and Candied Hazelnuts Dark Chocolate Bar. Black Cherry Cola and the Sour Watermelon Passionfruit are two of its fruit-forward gummy flavors.
In addition to the chocolate bars and gummies, Owens created a tablet line called Ratio – mint and fruit-flavored tabs similar to a SweetTart, but of course, with totally different properties. Both the Honeybee and Ratio brands are packaged with explicit dosing instructions for patients.
“The goal for Honeybee and Ratio is to use only the best ingredients I can source,” Owens said. “For Honeybee, I’m using imported Belgium chocolate and sourcing fruit from around the world; cherries from Romania, watermelon from Vietnam, and blood oranges from Spain. Everything is clean, natural and straight forward. Everything has to be right, because at the end of the day, it’s still a chocolate bar and a gumdrop. So let’s make them taste great.”
When asked what is the down the road as far as new additions or anything being baked, Owens had a few ideas.
“I do see a filled product, perhaps a caramel filled chocolate bar,” he said. “As for doing anything baked … we do have an oven, but baked goods have its own set of challenges. But wouldn’t a gooey butter cake be great?”
