Sliced thin with flecks of dill peeking out, the salmon looks like any other of gravlax you would have for brunch. But put it on a bagel with a schmear of cream cheese, and you will get pretty stoned eating this delicacy.
The mastermind behind the THC-infused salmon – cured in salt, dill, lemon, sugar and a weed tincture – is Josh Pollack, owner of Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen in Denver.
Pollack, a New Jersey native who grew up going to establishments like Russ and Daughters, moved to Colorado for college. He loved the state, but missed the bagels from back east. After graduating, he worked in finance for a while, but tired of that and moved on to a more fulfilling passion: food.
“I’ve always been food obsessed,” Pollack said. “Bagels and lox has always been a comfort food.”
It was tough to find his favorite comfort food, so specific to the New York and New Jersey area, in Denver. So last year, Pollack opened Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen to serve up classics like bagels and lox.
The idea to infuse salmon with a weed tincture came about as a “fun little thing to do” for the 4/20 “stoner holiday”, as Pollack called it, earlier this year. It was a hit, and caught the attention of The Huffington Post and Grub Street.
“It puts two things that people really love together,” he said. “That’s why I did it. There were people freaking out when they heard about it.”
The first batch, which Pollack and his team passed out to people at a 4/20 event, was a little strong, making it difficult for people to eat a whole bagel covered in the stuff. Through trial and error, Pollack and his team at Rosenberg’s have figured out the right proportion of weed to salmon.
LINK (via: The Guardian)
For those of you that want to use salmon to get high but don’t want to eat it, here’s a solution for you…
I get tip-offs about such culinary and other 420 excesses from a guy I met at school as a 13-year-old many years ago, a man who, for me, has always been a one-man Cheech and Chong, in those long-ago post-school years sending me postcards and lettergrams from places like Kulu and Manali, Kashmir, Kathmandhu and Afghanistan in the early 1970s before the Russians invaded – you get his travelling drift. He stopped doing these things years and years ago, but continues to send me emails with links to sometimes hilarious stories about Colorado Dispensaries (which to me looked like stripped-pine flyshops), people seriously self-medicating to avoid panic attacks (er, ever wondered why, fellas…?) and men who grow 25-strong banks of 16- to 18 foot trees somewhere in Mendo County, NorCal. Weird, wonderful and often absolutely fascinating stories!
Take something strictly small scale, very much counter-cultural and skip-the-city remote rural outer reaches, then turn it into a mega-business forever looking for new ways to package and sell an ever-growing quantity of over-produced product. I sometimes think to myself in my strictly non-medicated darker or insightful moments that there just might be parallels to be found in fly fishing….