Renowned confectioner Willy Wonka once put a three-course dinner into a single piece of chewing gum. DEE Thai is putting an entire Thai fruit market into its nine flavors of weed gummies.
We won't debate who had the cooler trick.
The fact remains, you can find these Thai edibles right now at many local L.A. dispensaries (and only Everlasting Gobstoppers in Lincoln Heights, but that's another story) jammed with the tropical flavors of mango, tamarind, papaya, lychee, mangosteen, jackfruit, coconut, grape, and guava, each with a 10 m.g. dose of THC each.
Dee is a Sacramento-based brand whose name translates to "good" in Thai, a word often evoked in the names of Thai businesses, such as Mee Dee Thai in South Central and Dee Thai Massage in Pico-Union.
According to the story on its website, Dee's "founding father," co-founder Josh Schmidt, also the vice president of business development for cannabis brand-creator Natura, moved to Bangkok and developed a wee a fetish for the place, as he "immersed himself in the local cuisine, culture, and markets."
As only a founding father can, he decided to bring an important cultural component of another nation back to the United States in the form of its flavors, infusing these solvent-free, hash rosin-infused gummies with fruit flavor and selling them to us with the lure of "a taste of Thailand in every bite!"
But the flavors are noticeably pronounced, smacking you with the real taste of their tropical fruit forebears. Smooth white pearls of the coconut gummy, mellow red lychee, and bright orange mango smack of their tropical sweetness, jackfruit's candied flavor hits more subdued, tamarind hints at a more caramelized sugar, and papaya even has that tiny tinge of overripe funk we love but still disguise with a blast of lime juice.
They taste great and work as promised, with each flavor apparently fueled by the Runtz Mintz strain of sensi. We found them at an aggressively agreeable price of $8 a bag in the Sawtelle neighborhood. Online, the company also mentions their pre-rolled blunts and "Thai Stick," which is unfortunately not the legendary hogtied bud of yore we've only read about in The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, but their name for vape pens.
Normally, we're not in edibles for the taste so much as to make Adult Swim funnier. We often balk at why so many people are trying to put weed into so many different foods. Like why do we need weed-infused pizza or cake when we want to eat the pizza or cake after we've gotten super zooted?
But the advent of Dee's Thai gummies and Don Perico's own delicious, Mexican-influenced chamoy, pineapple, and tamarind edibles is adding flavors we love to the world of cannabis, just as the spread of Mexican and Thai restaurants have saved us all from a world of bland, blanched dinners.
We can now envision a Jetsons-like world in which the flavors of savory international dishes are added to the mota mix, in which humanity can all get high together with some nice wiggly 1"x-1" squares that uncannily replicate your favorite creamy tom yum or clean menudo blanco.
That'll show that Wonka.
