Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chopped 420’ On Discovery+, Where Four Chefs Compete To Make Dishes That Incorporate Cannabis

Chopped 420 is the Chopped everyone has loved for the last 14 years on the Food Network, except the dishes that the four chefs who are competing in each episode use cannabis as a key ingredient. Host Ron Funches, who makes his love of cannabis known from the jump, is joined by judges Esther Choi, owner of New York Korean restaurant mŏkbar, Sam Talbot, a chef who was on one of the early seasons of Top Chef, and Laganja Estranja, a former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant that has become known as a cannabis advocate.

CHOPPED 420: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Ron Funches, surrounded by a few dozen strains of weed and products infused with THC or CBD, says “Warning: This program features extreme deliciousness and seriously high cuisine.”

The Gist: Chopped 420 plays out the same as the original Chopped: The four chefs make three courses, using ingredients and dishes that appear in a mystery basket, known as the “Secret Stash” here. It could be anything from a baked potato quesadilla to chocolate dentures to ketchup in the dessert round. After each 30 minute round, one dish and chef is “chopped.” The winner of the episode gets $10,000 and — maybe more lucrative — the right to call themselves a Chopped champion.

The main difference, though, is the addition of cannabis as an ingredient. Various strains, with names like WiFi OG and Blue Dream, all with different flavor profiles and medicinal properties, are available to the chefs, and the idea is to have the weed present in the dish, not hidden as one contestant finds out. But it should be complementary to the dish, as well as be in low-enough amounts to micro-dose the judges. In other words, if you’re ready to hit the couch after the appetizer, then there’s too much THC in the dish.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Chopped combined with two Netflix cannabis-based cooking competitions: Cooked With Cannabis and Cooking On High.

Our Take: Your enjoyment of Chopped 420 depends on how into pot you are. The show tries to explain things for people who are just casual tokers and imbibers, defining the characteristics of different strains and showing graphics for terms like “couch lock” (that’s a strain that makes you so sleepy you don’t get up from the couch after ingesting it). Funches and the judging panel are really into pot, and it shows here.

Despite the presence of Funches and Laganja Estranja, the tone of Chopped 420 is more serious than we expected, somewhere between its parent show and the very laid-back tone of Cooked With Cannabis. Sure, everyone’s getting a little stoned as the courses go along, and they show some of those between-round interactions, like Lagangia leading Ron and the other judges in one of her signature dances.

Funches injects a bit of humor and weed puns, but Choi and Talbot take this competition very seriously. Choi is especially critical, at least in the final edit, making sure to ding a chef if something is slightly overcooked or doesn’t quite have the right texture. All the chefs in the first episode are professionals, so it’s not like there’s some extreme misses and mistakes; the chefs get chopped for relatively small mistakes. But the winner of the first episode was pretty clear to us from the appetizer round, giving the judges the most varied and creative “journey” of the group, so we weren’t surprised when that chef won. That’s the nature of Chopped, though, and it really feels like that aspect is a luck-of-the-draw issue.

One thing we wanted a little more of: Some more education on how much THC and CBD is in each dish. The idea is that the chefs didn’t want to knock out the judges, just make them feel good. Cooked With Cannabis gives us the amount of each weed agent that’s in the dish, and we wanted Chopped 420 to go that level, too. Why? Because when we decide one day to cook with cannabis (it’s legal where we live!), we don’t want to knock ourselves out after a few bites.

Sex and Skin: Everyone on the show loves weed, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: After the winner is declared, a masked stage manager approaches the judges, and it looks like Laganja Estranja went on a longer journey than the other two; she put her head down for a nap.

Sleeper Star: One of the joys of Chopped is how these chefs make something interesting out of the odd stuff in their mystery baskets. Chocolate dentures? Ketchup for dessert? A garbage plate full of potatoes, ground beef, cheese and other stuff? The fact that the resulting dishes have any sort of coherence shows just how quick on their feet and imaginative these chefs are.

Most Pilot-y Line: One of the contestants uttered the words “single mom” so many times that we stopped seeing her as anything else. That’s not her fault, of course; that’s the fault of some heavy-handed editing work.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Chopped 420 is a bit more laid back than its long-running “sober” parent show, but it still takes the food — and the weed — seriously enough for hard core foodies and stoners to appreciate it.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Streamed Chopped 420 On Discovery+