The Weedeater: Deviled’s Lettuce Eggs

Welcome back to The Weedeater, Racket’s column exploring the exciting world of cooking with cannabis. Each month, I walk you through a tasty new cannabis-based recipe with foolproof instructions to make it yourself. Some are fast and easy. Others, elaborate and oh so very dumb. But all are delicious and leave you feeling real nice. With that, let’s get cooked!

Deviled’s Lettuce Eggs

I don’t get the big deal about Easter. So the guy took a big nap for a few days and then ascended onto the celestial plane or whatever. Who hasn’t? But being a lifelong Midwesterner, the things I do appreciate about Easter are all food-related. I love a good ham holiday, and Easter is the pinnacle of pork-based celebrations. On the sweeter side of things, Easter chocolate is superior to other holiday chocolate. Reese’s Christmas trees don’t hold an Advent candle to Reese’s eggs. 

Speaking of eggs… You can’t talk about Easter food without paying respect to the OG: the hard-boiled egg. Now, I don’t know if there’s an actual religious reason as to why eggs are the official culinary symbol of Easter (and frankly, I don’t wanna know) or if it was just the egg lobby trying to cash in on Catholic guilt in some way. What I do know is that it’s just not Easter unless I’ve personally housed at least a dozen deviled eggs before noon.

This year, Easter coincides with the holiest of holidays—4/20—so it’s only fitting that we add a little devil’s lettuce to our deviled eggs. As if that’s not exciting enough, we’re going to make our own cannabis oil to turn into cannabis mayo to devil our eggs from scratch. It may seem daunting, but I promise it’s not that hard. If I can do it, you can do it! 

Here’s what you’re gonna need.

For the cannabis oil

• 3 grams cannabis flower or trim*
• 1 cup neutral flavored oil like canola or vegetable

*Trim is all the small leaves and buds that get discarded during the trimming process. Ask your friends who grow their own weed at home. They probably have a bunch of trim you can use in exchange for deviled eggs! 

For the cannabis mayonnaise 

• 4 tablespoons cannabis oil combined with 3/4 cup non-cannabis canola oil
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 garlic clove, grated or finely minced
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• Optional but highly recommended: 1 teaspoon MSG or chicken powder 

For the eggs

• 6 large eggs
• 3 tablespoons cannabis mayonnaise
• 1 teaspoon dijon mustard
• 2–3 dashes hot sauce
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• Optional, but again, highly recommended: 1 tablespoon chicken powder (NOTE: if adding chicken powder, dial back the salt slightly)

Here’s what you’re gonna do.

1. Decarb your weed. The first step in cooking with cannabis flower is a process called decarboxylation, which activates the THC’s psychoactive compounds. If you don’t decarb your weed, your eggs won’t get you high, so don’t skip this step! I know it sounds all sciencey and hard but it’s actually really easy and only slightly made my apartment smell like weed for a few hours—nothing a candle and some open windows can’t fix. Anyway, measure out your flower or trim on a glass pie plate or baking dish. Cover it tightly with aluminum foil and bake it at 240 degrees for 30 minutes. After you take it out, let it cool with the foil still on.
2. Make the cannabis oil. Grind your decarbed weed as you would if you were going to smoke it. Put it in a 12-ounce Mason jar and cover it with 1 cup of neutral flavored cooking oil. I opted for canola. Seal the jar tightly and set in a large pot. Cover with water and bring to a low boil. Gently boil it uncovered for two hours, burping the jar once halfway through. As it boils, you’ll lose some water to evaporation, so just keep an eye on it and add more water as needed. At the two hour mark, remove the jar from the water and let it cool for 15-20 minutes. Strain the oil through your finest of mesh sieves into your cleanest of jars. Congratulations, you just made weed oil! Now, you’ll probably notice you have way more than the four tablespoons required to make the mayonnaise. But that’s OK! You can use your leftover oil any way you’d use non-weeded canola oil. Make a pan of brownies! Stir fry something! Pop some corn! Or, I guess you could just make a shitload of mayo. Either way, each tablespoon should be around 10-12 mg of the good stuff depending on the THC content of the flower you used so plan your recipes accordingly. Store your remaining cannabis oil in the fridge for up to a month or freezer for up to six months.
3. It’s mayo time. There are two basic methods to make homemade mayonnaise. One involves you whisking the everloving shit out of it; the other relies on an immersion blender and the wonders of electricity. For the whiskers among us, combine the egg, mustard, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Whisk until combined. Continue whisking while slowly drizzling in the oil. As the egg yolk emulsifies with the oil, the mixture will thicken into mayonnaise right before your eyes. If you’re going electric, look no further than J. Kenji López-Alt’s method. Add the egg, mustard, lemon juice, and garlic in a 12-ounce Mason jar. Pour the oil on top. Put the head of the immersion blender all the way at the bottom of the jar. Begin blending while slowly pulling the head of the blender up as the mixture emulsifies. Congratulations, you just made weed mayo! Each tablespoon of mayo should be around 3-5 mg. Again, you’ll end up with more than necessary for your eggs but you can use the leftovers to, say, make a tuna salad sandwich that’ll have you more baked than the bread you pile it on.
4. Now, let’s devil us some eggs. Lovingly place your eggs in a small pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, cover, and turn off the heat. Let them sit, covered, for 11 minutes. Drain and rinse them in cold water until they’re cool enough to handle. Peel the eggs using whatever method, spell, or ancient magic you rely on to successfully peel hard-boiled eggs. If you have a way that works, maybe drop that in the comments (to quote Nate P.). Place your loose, peeled eggs on a plate and let them cool in the fridge for 15-20 minutes. Cut each egg in half lengthwise. Carefully remove the yolks into a bowl. Mash them with a fork until they reach a pebbly texture. Add the cannabis mayo, mustard, hot sauce, salt, pepper, and chicken powder (if using) and mix to combine. Now you get to decide how fancy you want your eggs to look. For a more rustic egg, spoon the mixture back into the hard-boiled egg halves. For a more refined look, dump the yolk mixture into a gallon Ziploc bag, squeezing it down into one corner. Snip the corner of the bag and pipe the mixture into the egg halves. But if you really want your eggs to impress, get yourself a proper piping bag with a metal star tip. Or you can just chop up the egg whites, mix them back into the yolk mixture, and go to town on it with a spoon. They’re your eggs! Regardless of your filling method, you’ll probably end up with a little excess yolk mixture and you know what that means: chef’s treat!
5. Don’t skimp on your toppings. With deviled eggs, the devil really is in the details, and by details, I mean toppings. If you ask me, how you garnish your egg is almost as important as the egg itself. For mine, I mixed things up with a few different accoutrements. For my first choice I boldly eschewed the traditional sprinkling of paprika for a dusting of smoked paprika instead. Innovative, no? For two of my other toppings, I turned, as I usually do, to the good doctor. Some of my little devils took a trip to the Caribbean thanks to Doctor Dabs Jerk Seasoning. Others got the Nashville Hot treatment. Since I used chicken powder in both my mayo and my filling mixture, adding these two seasonings really created a chicken or the egg situation. Finally, I topped some with a single Granny’s Original THC pretzel which gave it some nice crunch and an extra hint of garlic and onion. Pre-topping, each deviled egg half should be around 2-3 mg each. If you use any Doctor Dab’s or Granny’s (or any other THC topping), that number will obviously increase slightly.

Or, you can take the easy way out.

As with most things in life, there are plenty of shortcuts to take here. For starters, you can buy pre-peeled, pre-hard boiled eggs. Depending on their freshness, you might sacrifice some taste and texture. Plus, given egg prices these days, you’ll definitely be paying for the convenience. For a full analysis on that though, we’ll need Jay’s investigative input.

If you don’t feel like making your own weed oil and mayonnaise, you can probably use some Sota Drops and store-bought mayo. I say “probably” because I haven’t personally tested that method out, but I’ve used the drops for other things and they’ve always worked just fine!

Finally, for a lighter dosage, you can make non-cannabis deviled eggs and top with Doctor Dabs or Granny’s for a simple 1 mg treat.

All that said, I really hope you give the full recipe a shot. It may seem challenging at first to make cannabis oil from scratch, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it actually was. While it’s a somewhat tedious process, you don’t have to babysit it too much. I was able to watch all of Air Force One with little interruption while I made mine. Man, remember when having a president worth saving was a believable movie plot? What a time.

Well, that’s all for this one. See you next time!