Chef Francis Baczek’s first venture into cooking with marijuana gave no indication that he might later have a career in the field.
“I didn’t really do much cooking with cannabis until I started in this industry,” he says. “I made some brownies when I was younger, but I never got into it. I didn’t know it was such a science.”
But after more than two decades working in a kitchen, Baczek knew more than enough about the culinary arts to cross over to the cannabis industry and take a position as an edibles chef for Uncle Herb’s in Payson, Arizona.
“I’m a patient myself and Uncle Herb’s is the dispensary that I went to,” Baczek says. “I threw it out there one day that if they ever needed a chef, I know my way around a kitchen. They offered me the job and once I got into it I realized that it’s only 20% about cooking.”
In addition to a commercial kitchen, Uncle Herb’s features an extraction lab and its own cultivation facility.
Baczek already knew that cleanliness was going to be a major factor in any kitchen, but what he didn’t see coming was the impending need to polish up on his arithmetic.
“Everything we do in this dispensary is like craft beer, where you have to reformulate every time because the oil is a little different — maybe a little stronger or it has more terpenes in it, things like that,” he says. “Juggling that means using more math than anyone would suspect in the cannabis industry.”
Outside of the cannabis industry, the title of chef has a somewhat universal, straightforward meaning. But in a vertically integrated, tightly regulated medical marijuana business, the word doesn’t quite encompass Baczek’s responsibilities at Uncle Herb’s, where he needs to coordinate with lab technicians and analyze test results on a regular basis, along with his regular kitchen duties.
“Basically, I do all the formulations and the actual making of the medicine myself,” Baczek says.
Relying heavily on the formulas derived from lab tests, Baczek uses cannabis oil for its accuracy and its natural flexibility as a cooking agent. Baczek says after the oil has been infused into a different agent, like cannabutter, then he can be certain that each Big Foot Bites chocolate bar — his personal favorite — has exactly 100 milligrams of THC.
Uncle Herb’s menu includes some of the more traditional fare like chocolates, cookies and hard candies, along with gluten-free, vegan and low-sugar options for patients at the 45 dispensaries that carry Uncle Herb’s products.
The brownie, however, is not listed among them.
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