Review: 4.20 Bar Marijuana Edible
Leave a CommentThis post will take you through an extended journey of the entire 4.20 Bar product line. You’ll get to know each flavor individually and gain a better understanding of the Venice Cookie Co., the company who produces this delectable edible.
Some attributes are shared across all flavors. The first is consistency. Each 1 ounce bar has six segmented doses, making compounded dosing easier, and contains 4.2 grams of dried cannabis.
The segments (six per bar) are on the small side and leave room for multiple pieces per sitting, making the 4.20 Bar effective for both beginner and seasoned patients. It’s recommended that beginners just start with one dose, and make there way up to another segment after waiting 30 minutes – 1 hour.
What you'll learn in this post:
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Milk Chocolate
We start our review with their base chocolate bar, the 38% cacao milk chocolate. It sets the tone for all other flavors in their product line — it features a smooth texture, tasty milk-chocolate and almost completely masks the taste and smell of cannabis contained within.
Milk Chocolate & Toffee
This variant uses the same milk chocolate as the bar above, but adds chunks of sweet toffee. The bar springs to life with its addition of caramelized sugar, and combines perfectly with milk chocolate to make for a delightful, tasty, and crunchy treat.
Milk Chocolate Hemp Crunch
The chocolate/toffee combo listed above was only an introduction to the crunchy-blast that the “Hemp Crunch” flavor provides. It’s loaded with hemp hearts and crisped rice to give it an even more noticeable crunch. It tastes very much like a Nestle Crunch or a Krackle bar. And I freaking love Krackle bars.
However, the 4.20 Bar version brings with it omegas 3,6, and 9 — the fatty acids widely celebrated for preventing stroke, diabetes, and heart disease and for promoting cell growth and a healthy immune system. For me, this makes the Hemp Crunch bar significantly more attractive than the Krackle bars I had to sell during my Little League days.
CBD Dark Chocolate
Those interested in the whole body benefit offered by Omega fatty acids might also enjoy a pinch of CBD as an antioxidant. The CBD Dark Chocolate bar is the only one not packing 180mg of THC. Instead, it splits its cannabinoids in a 2 to 1 ratio of CBD to THC. I typically go with the CBD-bar after a trip to the gym, as the anti-inflammatory properties help soothe my arthritic joints, while its antipsychotic, anti-anxiety, and anti-depressive properties keep me on an even keel.
Dark Chocolate & Sea Salt
The second bar in the dark chocolate series features 61% cacao, but adds a hint of sea salt for extra zest. And note: the salt is salty, while the dark chocolate is slightly bitter and velvety on the tongue. For those who crave the currently popular dark chocolate bar, but seek extra flavor, the sea-salt pairing in this bar will satisfy you and then some.
Blackberry Dark Chocolate & Popping Candy
A delightfully different addition to the 4.20 bar line, the “popping candy” (I imagine it’s very similar to Pop-Rocks) contained within this edible light your mouth up with a crackling, tingly sensation. In my opinion it only enhances the flavors of dark chocolate and berries. I also think the popping sensations encourages a faster sublingual uptake (which allows THC to enter your system faster, creating more immediate and exaggerated effects).
With the exception of the CBD bar, each 4.20 Bar has 180 mg of THC per bar and 30 mg of THC per segment across the product line. I take one or two pieces at a time to fit my tolerance-level, and often let the chocolate melt in my mouth to speed up the effects of ingesting cannabis. Typically within 45-55 minutes, I feel its full effects –a creative, distracting and uplifting high.
Despite struggling through three consecutive high-stress weeks, my experience with the line of 4.20 Bars has helped ease my mental anxiety, but has also reduced a lot of the tension in my shoulders.
But the versatility of this edible doesn’t stop there. I also took one dose before a trip to the gym, and was pleasantly surprised by how well it soothed muscle aches and allowed me to have a prolonged workout.
With its combined mental and physical effects, the 4.20 Bar by the Venice Cookie Co. is an effective solution for many symptoms.
Review: Miss Mary Jane’s Chocolate Caramel Cake Pop Edible
Leave a CommentWhen I was given one of Miss Mary Jane’s Chocolate Caramel Cake Pop Edible, it was alluded to that they would be fluffy, moist, and delicious. But somehow being told doesn’t fully prepare you for reality.
This cake pop is formed using a base of brilliantly velvet chocolate cake with an indulgent core of soft caramel filling. Surrounding is a thin crispy crust of decadent chocolate, drizzled to perfection to complete the aesthetic effect. There is only a hint of cannabis to the taste, as it’s difficult to mask completely.
That’s why chocolate is so often used in edibles – it’s a complementing effect. Rather than cover up the green flavor, the chocolate uses it to its benefit.
This medicated cake pop edible was made with Charlotte’s Web, a CBD rich strain first bred by the Stanley brothers from out of Colorado for Charlotte Figi, an 8 year old Dravet Syndrome patient who found relief from her seizures with the high CBD strain.
Miss Mary Jane’s Edibles gets their Charlotte’s Web from Coastal Collective in Santa Ana, one of the only Southern California dispensaries to carry this prized genetic.
At nearly 60 mg of total cannabinoids, this edible produces an incredibly sedative high, making it a fantastic treatment for the physical symptoms of anxiety.
Since CBD counteracts the anxiety or “paranoia” effect created by THC, Charlotte’s Web provides relief rather than creating more problems. There is an amazing physical relaxation, as pain melts away along with your stress.
Proponents of CBD rich products tout a lack of intoxication in the effects, making it great for those looking to avoid the traditional cannabis high. I would agree there’s not a high level of “intoxication”, but I did find plenty of light, smooth social interaction as a result of ingesting this product.
This edible made me re-think the value of CBD, being a sativa fan myself. As a sufferer of both pain and anxiety, this edible provided effective relief for my range of symptoms. While some patients’ utilization of high THC for other medicating needs prevents them from relying solely on CBD rich products, edibles like Miss Mary Jane’s Edibles’ chocolate caramel cake pop have plenty of pragmatic medicating uses.
The original version of this article can be found at OC Weed Review, a Nugg content partner.
High Dining: THC Infused Salmon
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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.
“I love bagels and lox, and I love cannabis,” Pollack said.
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.
“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 of THC-infused salmon, 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.
According to Colorado marijuana regulations, edibles sold recreationally must be wrapped individually or distributed in increments of no more than 10 milligrams of activated THC. To meet this law, which Pollack said is a “safe point” for most people, every three ounces of fish – the ideal serving amount for a bagel – should contain 10 milligrams of the tincture.
Pollack is still in the process of perfecting the dish, and said he has gotten more calculated each time they make a batch.
Pollack can’t currently sell the special salmon, but once he perfects the proportions, he hopes to sell it through local dispensaries. Unlike other edibles, salmon is “not a particularly shelf stable product”, so he said he will likely sell it on a special order basis.
The process of giving the salmon what Pollack calls a “tiny herbaceous flavor” is similar to the way he cures all the salmon for his delicatessen. First he makes a tincture by soaking weed in strong alcohol, straining it out and cooking the alcohol out of the remaining green liquid without activating the THC. Then, he adds the tincture to the recipe used for the cure recipe the delicatessen uses on all gravlax – a mixture of spices and a little bit of alcohol that acts as a retaining agent.
The salmon dries in the fridge for 72 hours to let the flavor disperse throughout the flesh and form a hard outer shell, and is then topped with lemon and dill.
“With this application, it goes really well to appropriately mask the flavor of the cannabis,” Pollack said. He said people like it because most edible products are brownies or candies – sweets filled with sugar that don’t really hide the flavor of cannabis, which not everyone likes. Savory items infused with weed, though on the rise, are still rare.
Now, Pollack is working on a new batch of gravlax for the Harvest Gathering, a Jewish food event in Colorado at the end of September, where he plans to teach Jewish chefs how to cook with cannabis. Lox isn’t the only Jewish food Pollack is currently infusing with weed; he’s also trying his hand at matzah ball soup, made with cannabis-infused schmaltz.
“Anything you can cook with fat, you can cook with cannabis,” he said.