Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cooked With Cannabis’ On Netflix, Where Kelis Hosts A Cooking Competition Full Of THC (And A Little CBD)

Since the legalization of recreational marijuana use in states like Colorado, California and Oregon, pot has become the hot new culinary trend, with many private chefs touting their skills with cannabis as the main feature of their businesses. They’re out to prove that you can get pot into more than just brownies and gummies, and as the new cooking competition series Cooked With Cannabis shows, meals infused with THC can be satisfying and make you mellow at the same time.

COOKED WITH CANNABIS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As we see scenes of people cooking in a television studio, we hear Kelis say in voice over: “There is a revolution taking the cooking world by storm, and it’s all because of this star ingredient: Pot!”

The Gist: Singer/culinary expert Kelis hosts Cooked With Cannabis with Portland’s best known cannabis chef, Leather Storrs. In each episode, three chefs with experience cooking with pot will be given a theme and limited time to come up with an appetizer entree and dessert. Each course has to have THC infused in one of the ingredients. The winner of the contest gets $10,000. It’s as simple as that.

Kelis and Storrs are the ultimate judges, but in every episode, they’re helped by celebrity tasters, mainly to see how they act as they get stoned off the 9 different courses they’re eating. In the first episode, where the theme was “Grilled Backyard BBQ,” the celebrity panel consisted of Ricki Lake, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jo Koy and Elle King. The chefs are almost as funny as the judges: Amanda started working with pot when she decided to put a little bit she had laying around in a pecan pie; Nate has been grinding away as a cannabis-based chef since he was 20; and Cynthia has been doing cannabis cooking for over 20 years (and has been smoking it for way longer than that). She may be the oldest one in the room, but she’s also the most entertaining.

This isn’t as random as Chopped; the contestants know the theme ahead of time, and they’ve come prepared with THC-infused ingredients (THC being described by the show as “the fun part” of the cannabis plant), derived from the strain of pot they think will provide the best flavors for their dishes. They also get to use THC- and CBD-infused oils in their cooking (CBD is the chemical in cannabis that has medicinal value, and is used by the chefs to “even out” the high the people eating their food will experience). In most cases, each entree has somewhere between 2-4mg of THC, in order to micro-dose the diners so they don’t get zonked out immediately. But what no one realizes is that, if you’re eating 9 courses with 2-4mg of THC in each, it builds up.

Our Take: Cooked With Cannabis might look like a Chopped-style cooking competition, but the show is about 100% less uptight and serious. Pretty much anyone who consumes pot in one form or another can’t help but be laid back or silly or both, and we see that here.

One of the things that sets this show apart is Kelis. People don’t realize that the woman who brought us the phrase “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard” also studied as a saucier at Paris’s famed cooking school Le Cordon Bleu from 2006-10. She’s an actual real-life chef, so she knows her shit when it comes to food. Her fun energy balances out Leather Storrs’ intensity; who knew that someone who was a cannabis chef could be so in your face? But somehow, Storrs is.

The other key to this show is the celebrity tasting panel. They’re really not there to give specific critiques to the food; they’re just there to eat some good meals and get mildly stoned. And as the courses go along, it’s funny seeing Elle King tell Ricki and Mary Lynn how much she loves them, and how they all just descend into giggles at the slightest provocation. Not even Kelis and Storrs are spared; at one point, it gets so smoky in the studio, even with the big doors open to the outside, that Storrs gets a fire extinguisher.

But the chefs are taking things relatively seriously, and it comes out in the universally excellent dishes they create. This isn’t Nailed It!, where people try their best and fail; these are professional chefs who know what they’re doing with pot. They even know the kinds of highs certain strains give so they can balance out a “head high” with a different kind of high in a later course. The producers helpfully give us all the explanations we need about those things through either graphics or during the chef interviews.

What’s refreshing is that, outside of the possible exception of Storrs, everyone is there to have fun and not take the pot stuff all that seriously. You know those people that are so into pot that all they talk and think about is the last time they got high or the next time they get high? That was mostly not present in the first episode, and we are very thankful about that.

Sex and Skin: Except for panelists basically making love to their meals (Ricki Lake guzzles down Amanda’s gazpacho like it’ll be the last meal she’ll ever have), there’s nothing, of course.

Parting Shot: The winner has to listen to Storrs yell in his/her ear, but he/she is too happy to care.

Sleeper Star: The food just looked so damn good. Nate made a simple burger with THC-infused poblano butter that made me want one that very instant. Amanda added pot smoke to her gazpacho to give it the feeling that you’re smoking weed. And we appreciated that the chefs were fairly careful about their dosing to make sure things didn’t get out of hand (except for maybe Cynthia, who said “I don’t know, 2 mg?” a lot).

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing really stands out.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Cooked With Cannabis shows that there are other ways to use the flavorful nature of pot than just baking it into brownies or making it into gummy bears. And if those meals make us both full and a little mellow, well, we want to learn how to make them.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Cooked With Cannbis On Netflix