Richard Park’s budtenders go through a one-year training program before they’re allowed to talk, unmonitored, to customers at Andersonville’s Dispensary 33, where he’s a founding partner and director of operations. That’s why pastry chef Mindy Segal suggested he would be a good person to explain the do’s and don’ts of dabbing, or vaporizing cannabis concentrates.
The varieties of amorphous blobs that result are sold in appetizing shades of honey, amber, cream, and gold, with names such as shatter, sugar, sauce, budder, batter, crumble, rosin, kief, and good old hash. (Those in the corporate cannabis industry, Park says, are “masters of making up their own names for shit.”) They look good enough to eat—like candy—and in fact, employing them in the kitchen is one of the easiest, most predictable ways to cook with cannabis.
He and budtender Aleks Glass set up a dab station on a conference table spread with a variety of rigs, vapor straws, and handheld vaporizers, along with a microscope, an instant-read thermometer, an aroma diffuser, and a caseful of little childproof jars of cannabis concentrate.
To start, Park used a stainless-steel dab tool (like something a dentist would probe your gums with) to break a tiny chip off the edge of a postage-stamp-size sheet of shatter extracted from Alien Bubba, a physically relaxing, sedative strain. Then he applied a handheld butane-fueled blowtorch to the base of the quartz bowl, or “banger,” attached to a filigreed glass dab rig.
“My purpose is to never get stoned in one hit,” he says. “You can always hit it twice. You don’t have to kill yourself with one rip. Which is what a lot of younger people do.”
That’s another advantage cannabis concentrates have over cannabis flower. Sometimes people—particularly sick people—need a lot of potency, and need it fast.
5001 N. Clark 312-620-3333 dispensary33.com
