Cannabis as a Nutritious Vegetable Recipe #1
Grow for the vitamins, enjoy for the flavor! Cannabis Leaf Miso Soup Recipe inside!
So today let’s have a conversation about cannabis as a nutritious vegetable, and enjoy a recipe to get you started!
Cannabis as a vegetable is a completely, 100% sober culinary experience.
Cannabis as a vegetable is a mainstay in my home. I grow often, and many plants I grow only as a green vegetable. When you grow cannabis as a green vegetable you don’t have to worry if your seed is male or female, or if it’s going to produce good quality cannabinoid content because you are only growing it as a culinary vegetable. And when you grow for this purpose, cannabinoids are not the focus, flavor and freshness are.
The part of the plant we use for culinary purpose are fresh, green, young fan leaves. We don’t use buds or pre-buds, stalks or roots. This means that when you are growing a cannabis plant as a vegetable that you don’t have to worry about sexing, light timing, nutrients, and all the other fuss that we have to worry about when we grow it for cannabinoid content. We can grow in a simple pot, with regular nitrogen-rich potting soil in a sunny window or under a regular houseplant light. All we are concerned about when we grow cannabis as a vegetable is the amount and quality of leafy greens it produces. Like lettuce!
If you can grow a leafy houseplant, you can grow cannabis as a vegetable.
The caveat here is that we grow our cannabis plant for its fresh leaves only for about a four weeks, tops. This is because after that point it may start to show some sex characteristics and begin building more cannabinoid content. Once this begins to happen it’s no longer used for our culinary-only purposes and you’ll want to harvest the whole thing before then and start a new plant. For culinary purposes we want a young, bushy and very leafy cannabis plant only.
What sort of nutritional profile do cannabis leaves have?
That’s a good question and there have been some scientific studies on the nutritional profile of cannabis leaves like this one: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2024.1501484/full
The most basic information about this is that cannabis leaves have a similar nutrient profile to other bitter leafy green vegetables. They contain some cannabinoid pre-cursors and acids which have been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties. This is similar to a lot of other bitter leafy greens which also have their own unique chemistry.
Essentially, cannabis leaves are going to have the rich nutrient profile you would expect in a leafy green vegetable.
What do cannabis leaves taste like?
Cannabis leaves are “bitter green” and you’ll want to use them in recipes that would call for this kind of green. Think of bitter leafy green vegetables like radicchio, seaweed, kale, endive, arugula, mustard, lettuces, dandelion, etc. Bitter greens are renown for flavor and their properties in balancing flavors and promoting digestion. And all bitter leafy greens have their own sorts of flavor profiles.
Cannabis as a bitter leafy green can taste different depending on the preparation. So, for example, Cannabis Leaf Miso Soup, one of my favorite ways to enjoy cannabis as a leafy green vegetable, cannabis leaves replace seaweed in the final step of the soup preparation.
How is the cannabis leaf prepared to use in recipes?
We start with the younger fan leaves leaving the older, more fibrous leaves on the plant. These will be mature leaves, but less fibrous.
When we use cannabis leaves as a culinary vegetable, it’s always more tasty to remove the single “finger” leaves from the main stem of the whole leaf, which is the most fibrous part of the leaf. Unless you are using the fresh leaves in a smoothie, or something like that where the texture of the fiber isn’t a taste issue.
The use of these single “finger” leaves is featured in the recipe for today.
Can anyone grow this as a vegetable?
Keep in mind that even though you may be growing your cannabis plant for vegetation purposes only and never allow it to reach sexual maturity that you are still bound by the laws of your locale. For example: If you live in a state where any adult can grow four cannabis plants for personal use, such as the state I live in, my vegetation only plant not grown for any psychoactive purpose still counts as one of the four plants I am allowed to grow. If you live in a state where growing cannabis is completely illegal, then as stupid as those laws are, they still apply to your vegetation-only plant, unfortunately. Illegal vegetables are illegal vegetables.