Denver deli hopes to perfect cured salmon that will get you high

Bagels, cream cheese, salmon…. and weed?

Rosenberg's Bagels and Delicatessen went viral last spring when news of its cannabis-infused cured salmon took the internet by storm. Since then, The Guardian reports, the Colorado deli has has been working to perfect its heady gravlax recipe so it can eventually sell it to dispensaries. The deli currently doesn't sell the salmon.

Rosenberg's owner Jason Pollack told The Guardian that he came up with the idea of infusing pot into gravlax as a joke, but the samples were so popular that he has decided to perfect his technique and sell the combination.

"It puts two things that people really love together," Pollack said. "That's why I did it. There were people freaking out when they heard about it."

Pollack makes a tincture -- a combination of herbs and strong alcohol -- with the marijuana, then spreads it onto the salmon along with salt and other ingredients. After about 72 hours, including a period of rest to dry the surface, the flavors and the THC – the chief psychoactive component in marijuana -- spread throughout the filet. Gravlax is traditionally left unsmoked.

Alaskans may wonder about the source of the salmon. Boulder Weekly reported that the salmon Rosenberg's uses comes from Scotland, not Alaska, but there's no mention of whether it's farmed or not. Scotland does have wild salmon runs, but commercial fishing of them is limited, and it is a major exporter of farmed salmon. After controversy triggered by a decline in its wild runs, the country is currently in the middle of re-examining its management policies. If Rosenberg's salmon is indeed farmed, it would make a certain amount of sense from a canna-culinary standpoint. Farmed salmon contain more fat than wild salmon do, and THC is fat-soluble.

Pollack said is still perfecting the recipe to make sure each serving of bagels and the special gravlax does not exceed 10 milligrams of THC – the legal limit per serving size of cannabis edibles in Colorado. he said the savory herbal flavors of the gravlax do a good job of hiding, and even complementing, the grassy, weedy taste of the alcohol-based cannabis tincture.

But Pollack isn't stopping at pot-infused gravlax. At The Harvest, an upcoming Jewish food festival in Colorado, he will soon spread his cannabis-infused salmon-curing technique to other chefs. And he's currently developing more ways to cook with cannabis, including infused matzah ball soup.

"Anything you can cook with fat, you can cook with cannabis," he told the Guardian.

The Guardian published their report on Sept. 17, but Rosenberg's deli went viral last spring when the word first got out about their alchemy. Read previous reports at the Denver Post's The Cannabist, and at Boulder Weekly. And get a window into the process itself from the YouTube video below, produced by The Smoker's Club, which reportedly does branding work for cannabis companies.