A Long, Strange Trip: Chef's Love Of Hemp Oil

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Greg Perez has always hung out on or near the leading edge. Back in the early 1980s, he was one of the youngest executive chefs in town at the Mayfair Hotel. Thereafter he was among the first to introduce tapas-style dining to St. Louis through some of the dishes at the Blue Water Grill; he pushed the boundaries of the Delmar Loop eastward and lengthened by-the-glass wine lists at his critically and popularly acclaimed Painted Plates restaurant; and most recently, he turned St. Louis on to a "vapor bar" and a hemp-infused menu at his Grateful Inn in Maplewood.

Those last two items might sound far out and groovy, but in fact Perez is stone-cold sober about the flavor and nutritional benefits of industrial hemp, which he calls the "mild-mannered cousin" of the more infamous member of the cannabis family, marijuana. His latest project is bottling and marketing Greg's Hemp Oil Vinaigrette, which he currently sells locally and in California but plans to distribute nationwide.

"I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't give this a full-fledged shot," says Perez, 48, who sold the Grateful Inn this year. (The space now houses a new restaurant, Fu Manchu.) "Being the first entry into the market seems to mean a lot."

But Perez has faced a number of legal, economic and psychological barriers in working with hemp seed and hemp oil. First and foremost, cultivation of industrial hemp is illegal in the United States. Vermont and North Dakota have recently passed state laws promoting legalization; the states must now make their case for repeal of the federal ban. That means Perez must import hemp oil from
Canada, where he buys it in 55-gallon drums.

Perez came up with the recipe for his vinaigrette at the Grateful Inn. After deciding to mass-market it, he worked with Arcobasso Foods of St. Louis to formulate a recipe that could be replicated on a much larger scale.


"We still had to work back and forth for a while to get it right," Perez says. "Then some of the customers objected to using bleached sugar, so we replaced it with unrefined sugar. And others, primarily in California, didn't want it to use canola oil, so I changed it to soy oil."

Another evolution occurred in the packaging, which initially featured an illustration of a hemp leaf. Perez was already aware of the widespread misperception that hemp and marijuana were synonymous. "One of the most-asked questions is whether it will make you high," Perez says. (It won't.)

"My distributor told me that about 30 percent of the national market was turning it down because of the leaf," Perez says. "One of the biggest things I face is public education, and I figured that if people saw that leaf they'd at least read the label. But eventually we changed it."

The main element of that public education is hemp oil's nutritional profile, which includes a high essential fatty acid (EFA) content and a 3-to-1 ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acids. Many nutritional studies have linked consumption of foods with that type of ratio to decreased incidence of cardiovascular disease, arthritis, diabetes and skin and mood disorders.

Perez also spends quite a bit of time doing consumer demonstrations in food stores. "Sometimes I ask people if they're familiar with flaxseed oil, which has a similar nutritional profile," Perez says. "And sometimes people say, 'Oh, yeah, hemp — that's what clothes are made of.'"

His vinaigrette is made with apple-cider vinegar and spices, with much of the herbaceous flavor coming from the hemp oil itself. The soy oil cuts the strength of the hemp oil flavor and acts as a stabilizer, helping to extend the short shelf life of pure hemp oil. Even so, Perez recommends that the vinaigrette be refrigerated after opening.

"Most people have never tasted hemp oil before, so they have to make a whole new file folder in their brain for it to register," Perez says. Those who have tried pure hemp oil, he adds, frequently find it to be overpowering.

Perez's current challenge is determining how to expand. "We've been selling it in stores for $4.99, but I'd really like to get the price down to $3.99 so it's competitive with lots of other salad dressings," Perez says. "If I keep doing almost everything myself, I look at this project as taking another two or three years. Some of my friends tell me I need to find an investor and sell 49 percent or something, but I'm not sure that's what I want."


Chef Greg Perez, former restauranteur, is into hemp, which won't get you high, but may improve your health. He makes vinaigrette and other food products from hemp seed oil.

Greg's Hemp Oil is produced in fairly small batches. It has been available recently at Dierbergs, Whole Foods Market and the Natural Way in Webster Groves. (Perez will host informal demonstrations of the oil from 3-6 p.m. today at Whole Foods, 1601 South Brentwood Boulevard.) There's also a link for ordering on Perez's website, gregshempoilvin.com.




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Copyright: 2008 ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
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