5 mistakes when cooking with cannabis you need to fix right now

Cannabis Cooking Mistakes Every First-Timer Makes in the Kitchen from CannabisNet on Vimeo.

This article is about fails and gaining new experience. Cooking with cannabis can be a little bit tricky. So, let’s work on mistakes.

Mistake #1: Wrong strain

The first mistake people make when making weed edibles is choosing the wrong strain. When you choose a strain to use, there are many considerations you need to give your attention to. These include:

CBD level
THC level
Taste, flavor, smell
Medicinal or recreation
What form is it in i.e. herbal, hash, oil, tincture

And there are more considerations. If you pick the wrong strain, you may get too high, not high enough, or you may be trying to use a non-psychoactive strain and end up with one that gets your grandmother high when you were trying to just give her a little CBD to help her sleep.

You can see from this screen shot of our site at NCSM that ACDC might be just the right strain to get grandma feeling better without her flying to the moon and back.

marijuana strain review ACDC

Mistake #2: Decarboxylating incorrectly

Decarboxylation is what activates the cannabinoids in your marijuana edible. For a quick decarboxylation, you need to bake your weed at around 240 F for about 30 minutes, but that’s not the whole story. If you bake it too high for too long, you will evaporate your cannabinoids and your active THC will degrade to inactive substances or to CBN, which does not have the same effects as our valuable THC. If you bake it for too short a time or too low a temperature, you won’t get a psychoactive effect at all because your THC-acid will not convert to active THC.

Here is a decarboxylation chart created by researchers:

cannabis decarb chart

As you can see from the chart, the fastest way to get the best THC content is to take well-dried weed, preheat the oven to about 293 degrees Fahrenheit, and bake for about 7 minutes and you are done. As you can see, at around 300 degrees, THC levels plummet for every minute above 7. Now this is done under lab conditions, so it may take 10 minutes at around 300 degrees in a home situation. However, you can see a second peak for a bake at around 250 degrees Fahrenheit, at around 30 minutes, so our initial bake recommendation is right on the money for your average weed cook.

Mistake #3 Not adding water when making cannabutter

For full results, you need to extract your cannabinoids into a proper medium. You can do this by making oil or tincture.

When you are making cannaoil for your recipes, you will want to cook your weed on low for two hours or more. You can use a pot, crockpot, or pan, and there are even ways to do it in the oven but it’s normally done on the stove top. Throw in your pound of butter, ounce of weed, and a cup of water. If you don’t add the water, your butter will burn and ruin your weed butter. If you got it all down correctly, simmer for 3 hours. Strain out the plant material, then put it in the fridge for 30 minutes or more, the butter will solidify and rise to the top. Click here to see all the weed edibles you can make with your butter.

Overcooking

When making weed edibles, overcooking is your enemy at every stage. Your cannabinoids are precious and must be handled at the right temperatures. It is first dried. Then decarbed. Now, you got all your cannabinoids ready to do their thing, but you still need to infuse them into a delicious treat to impress your friends. So, now you simmer in butter and water for 3 hours, lightly, on low, to make sure you don’t destroy your precious cannabinoids. After all this, when you bake your butter in your recipe, you run the risk of losing more cannabinoids so be sure not to bake for too long or at too high a temperature. Also, you might just use the butter as a spread for brownies or cookies AFTER they come out of the oven.

Overdosing

overdosing cannabis

Overdosing is probably the main mistake people make with edibles. Overdosing on pot is rarely physically dangerous but can cause some massive freak outs. The picture above refers to the case of a cop who confiscated marijuana, made brownies from it, and he and his wife ate them without carefully measuring how much they consumed. They got so freaked out, they thought they were dying and called police on themselves. So, don’t be the jabroni. How much weed you use to make your edibles, that’s how much weed is in the edibles. Don’t use more than you would smoke and wait 90 minutes for the effects.

If you are ready for a stronger experience, consider making weed hash. Thanks for reading and smoke good!

- Laurie Wolf