Advancements in cannabis legalization have allowed millions of people to access recreational and medicinal weed effortlessly. But smoking weed is not everyone’s beloved activity, and some savvy users try themselves in the role of canna chefs, trying to cook delicious weed-infused meals for themselves or a fun party with friends.
Cooking with weed might seem as easy as throwing a couple of buds into the flour, right? We’re sorry to upset you, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. If you cook CBD edibles this way, don’t expect that much effect you would get from weed’s cannabinoids. To achieve the right CBD/THC concentration and feel the desired impact, you need to avoid the common beginner mistakes we’ve laid out below.
#1 Skipping the Decarboxylation Stage
While you use raw weed (dried weed buds, to be more precise) during smoking, it doesn’t work with CBD edibles. Throwing your weed into the dough won’t get you high or relaxed; it’s just a waste of pretty expensive cannabis. The mandatory preliminary process of weed preparation for cooking is decarboxylation. It involves heating the weed at the correct temperature to trigger a chemical reaction – CBDa and THCa transformation into the bioavailable CBD and THC.
Here is the correct breakdown of the decarbing process:
- Chop or grind your weed into relatively small parts and distribute them over an oven tray, conveniently placed on the parchment paper.
- Heat your oven to 110-1200C.
- Heat your weed for 30-45 minutes and stir it every 10 minutes to achieve even heating.
- Monitor the weed’s color change and stop the heating once you see it gets a light toasted shade.
- Now you can either put the weed into your edible as it is or infuse oil or butter with it.
Use these tips to derive the maximum value from your weed and enjoy the expected result.
#2 Neglect of the Dosing
Weed edibles are generally considered a dangerous field of experimentation, even if you buy ready products at your local dispensary. You can never know their chemical composition for sure, as most edibles lack proper labeling and leave the CBD/THC ratio to guesswork.
However, when you embark on the weed-cooking task at home, it’s your personal responsibility to dose the weed safely. Use a precise formula to calculate the potency of CBD/THC in your oil infusion (you can easily figure that out by weighing your weed before decarbing and dividing the THC/CBD constituents by the number of oil’s grams). Use these calculations to know for sure how much THC and CBD a gram of your canna-oil or canna butter contains to know how much to put into the meal.
For instance, you want to cook a relaxing pie with your favorite Mendo Breath strain. Just keep in mind that the more isn’t the better in this case; by adding too much weed to the recipe, you risk ending up with a bunch of unpleasant side effects. Therefore, keeping the right dose is the key to enjoying CBD edibles safely.
#3 Overheating
THC and CBD can indeed be derived from weed buds only with heating. However, the temperature of the heating makes or breaks the entire process. Never heat your weed to more than 2000C, as a higher temperature causes THC to break down. Thus, you will have no high effect from a canna oil prepared at extreme temperatures.
It’s also recommended to avoid overheating ready weed-infused oils you buy at a store. Don’t fry food in canna oil; it’s a pure waste of the product. Baking your brownies or cookies is safe at 1900C, which is an ideal temperature for these desserts.
#4 Over-Grinding
Are you a fan of bitter, grassy taste? If not (which is okay), you need to avoid over-grinding your weed buds to dust. This result is unavoidable if you use a coffee grinder or an automated food processor to break down the buds into smaller particles for decarboxylation. Ideally, you would need particles sized at coarse salt to receive a pleasant aroma and taste of the weed-infused products. We recommend using a hand grinder at this preparatory stage; it’s easier to control the size of particles this way.
Insufficient Butter Stirring
The final tip for rookies is to stir your canna butter well before pouring it into the dough or mixing it with the ready meal. The problem with insufficient stirring is uneven weed distribution in your edibles. As a result, you can turn edible consumption into a lottery – one person will feel zero effects, while another one will be stricken with an overdose. So, we advise weed-cooking beginners to dedicate enough time to careful stirring, thus achieving an even texture and a predictable effect.
Cooking Is Art
As you might see, cooking with weed is an art in itself. Follow our advice, apply some simple math, and your edibles will promise a delicious user experience instead of unpredictable side effects or zero potency. It would help to keep these simple tips in mind to advance in canna cooking and avoid wasting your weed in vain.
