3 Quick Bites: Marijuana and matzo balls

Every week, I compile a short list of food items on the Internet that made me hungry, curious, confused or all of the above.

Marijuana and matzo balls
Denver chef Joshua Pollock is taking Jewish cuisine higher by infusing such items as matzo balls and lox and a bagel with cannabis. Since pot became legal in Colorado, Pollock’s deli, Rosenberg’s Bagels, has been on the forefront of a local movement to incorporate weed’s active ingredient, THC, into edible creations. His first idea was to cure lox in a marijuana solution. He was recently invited to serve the “not your bubbe’s” matzo balls at a Jewish food conference, the Harvest Gathering. Mazel tov!

Read more about 4/20-friendly Jewish deli food >>

Is your chicken paprikash the best it can possibly be?
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, managing culinary director at Serious Eats and author of “The Food Lab” column, has a trademark style of obsessively testing and tweaking recipes and ingredients until he finds the best possible techniques. When he turns his attention to a dish, expect him to question every piece of conventional wisdom about that recipe. Chicken paprikash, the beloved Hungarian comfort food, is his latest, and what he finds out (the best types of paprika to use, when to add the paprika, how to coax the natural juice out of the chicken and much more) is a must-read for any paprikash enthusiast.

Food in the Atomic Age
We’ve all seen—and mocked in horror—shockingly artificial-looking ’50s, ’60s and ’70s dishes like gelatin molds of tomato aspic, marshmallowy fruit salads and mayonnaise-laden salmon mousses. But a recent piece in The New York Times Magazine invites us to see the absurd beauty in the foods of the Betty Crocker age. Artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari prepared and styled food from 1971 recipe cards, “with humor and without mercy.”

Check out the results here >>

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