Getting Baked on Hemp

By Arthur Hanks
At a recent industry conference held in a snow-swept prairie province, the minister of technology surprised me by smuggling into his otherwise proforma speech an anecdote about breadmaking. He made bread, he said, because he found it relaxing. The minister asked for a show of hands, only a few responded. Most of the audience were men, which is pretty much what you get in agricultural fields, so of the many people there, most of them didn’t bake bread. Undaunted, and committed to his anecdote, the minister plunged ahead and said that he made the bread with his hemp oil. The cold-pressed hemp oil used in the bread was delicious, in fact, according to him, it was the best tasting bread he had ever made

I must congratulate the minister for his culinary adventures, but his story does raise a very interesting question. Can and should you cook with hemp? Certainly! Cooking with hemp oil adds flavour to all foods and helps to fuse ingredients into a synergistic whole. Who, except the warm West Coast raw food crowd, would reject a hot, well-cooked meal, especially during a Canadian winter? But cooking also changes the constituents of food, and hemp oil is no exception.
Now, one of the best parts of hemp seed is the oil content, which is about 35% of the seed. This oil contains the Omega-3 and Omega-6 essential fatty acids (EFA’s) that help make hemp such a wonderful health food and nutraceutical. Hemp is reactive to both heat and light, which is why you usually buy hemp oil packaged in dark bottles and stored in a fridge. Cooking (and heat) alters the particular molecular geometries of these fatty acids, straightening out the chemical bonds in the food’s compounds and transforming them into unhealthy trans-fatty acids (TFA’s). And the more EFA’s in a food, the more to be transformed into TFA’s. TFA’s have been linked to many degenerative physical conditions, like diabetes and increased risk of heart attacks. No wonder that some fast food restaurants are now changing their cooking oils and trying to bring their TFA content down. They may get some publicity, but they will never reach their goal, as all cooking oils are commonly refined, bleached and deodorized. While these processes make oil much more “shelf-stable” - which is useful for commerce - they eliminate many of the best nutrients found in oils.
Interestingly, hemp’s health benefits lay not just in the food itself, but what the body does with hemp. Normally, enzymatic reactions help convert EFA’s into other metabolic products that the body needs.

If heat changes the structure of these EFA’s, then essentially the body gets confused; necessary enzymes are not produced as the metabolic pathways are blocked.  So, knowing this, some common sense advise to follow is: “If it’s too hot to eat, it’s too hot for hemp oil.” So you shouldn’t think of hemp as a frying or cooking oil (whether or not you should even bother frying any oil is outside of the scan of this article). But you can warm hemp oil at a low temperature for short periods of time.  Until we know more, experts suggest that hemp oil can be briefly heated to temperatures of between 100-150 degrees C. Don’t overdo it. Definitely, you can add hemp oil to cooked foods - a tablespoon of hemp oil over steaming rice, pasta al dente, toasted whole wheat bread, or your morning oatmeal is delicious.
OK, so more to the point: Can I bake with hemp oil?
As noted, you will have some degradation of the hemp oil, if you cook at high temperatures for a sustained period of time.
But in baked goods, the degradation will be limited to the browned outer layers of crust; the inner layer should remain moist and unaffected. So, what you are doing is making a trade-off between degrees of health and taste. Extra conscious folk may want to cut off the crusts, but that’s probably overdoing it for many. Is there a happy medium here? I think there should be. A healthy, active lifestyle will help the body process small amounts of TFA’s. And if you eat fresh, uncooked fresh-pressed hemp oil already as part of your diet, you should be all the better prepared to deal with those small amounts. As with everything, moderation is key. Arthur Hanks is a Saskatchewan writer who never grows tired of hemp for some reason. He can be reached at hcfr@sk.sympatico.ca

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