From Fine Dining to Infused Cuisine, Deborah Jean Pushes the Envelope of French-Haitian Food
Contrary to pervasive stereotypes, there’s more to cooking with cannabis than just sprinkling weed onto a dish and getting stoned beyond belief. Crafting delicious (and properly dosed) dishes requires a level of scientific understanding and technical skill that both home cooks and professional chefs may find daunting. Fortunately, for Brooklyn-born Haitian chef Deborah Jean, methodical, detail-oriented cooking has been her specialty since culinary school.
After graduating from SUNY Delhi with dual degrees in culinary arts and hospitality management, Jean immediately found a professional home in high intensity French kitchens. She was on the opening team of Daniel Rose’s now-Michelin-starred Le Coucou, where she worked every station in its kitchen. After two years, she moved over to Brooklyn’s French Louie, and eventually ended up back in Manhattan working as a sous chef for Rose’s wife, Marie-Aude, at La Mercerie in Soho. But when the pandemic forced her to slow down and pivot towards private chef work, Jean found the freedom to lean into her Caribbean heritage and make “full-throttle Haitian-French food.”
A former French colony, Haiti’s culinary legacy has a unique relationship with the cuisine of France, which Jean brilliantly uses her decade of experience in French fine dining to explore. Crafting dishes like deconstructed pink potato salad with fresh beets and delicate plantain pavé, Jean’s work exhibits both unbridled creative passion and undeniable technical skill that has garnered the attention of many, and recently landed her a spot on Food Network’s “Chopped.”
Prior to her television appearance, however, Jean was approached with a different culinary proposition that changed the course of her work: “Cherise and Steven reached out to me and said, ‘We specialize in infused [dinner parties],’” she recalls. “‘We love your food and are willing to teach you the [cannabis] dosages and everything else. Would you be interested?’” Thrilled by the opportunity to master new skills, Jean found the transition from making French food to cooking with cannabis seamless.
“French cooking is really good for infusing because we use a ton of butter and a ton of fat in everything that we do,” she says. “Beurre blanc is really good to infuse because it’s a butter-based sauce that can go on anything.” If you want to try your hand at making high French cuisine at home, chef recommends making this classic white wine sauce with a couple knobs of infused butter and serving it over poached asparagus topped with toasted sliced almonds (which can be toasted in even more canna-butter for an extra hit).
For Jean, incorporating cannabis into her Haitian-French menus has become a passion that spans beyond just getting guests buzzed. “The main focus is community, being together and supporting each other,” she says. “[Cannabis] calms you enough where you can have the courage to speak to someone that you probably wanted to speak to before. Every single person is talking to each other, talking about the flavors, asking more questions, and making connections.”
