Planning To Cook Cannabis? Here Are Some Useful Tips
Cooking with cannabis is a fantastic way to get the full effects of your plant without the harmful effects of smoking it. Moreover, the results you will experience are generally considered more intense and longer-lasting, making it perfect for those who want to try something more interesting than smoking. However, if you are going to cook cannabis, you need to know a few things before beginning.
How Does Eating It Compare to Smoking It?
The most common way to consume cannabis is by smoking, but eating it has many benefits. While smoking weed produces the most immediate effects, eating it creates a much more intense and lasting impact. Smoking and vaping are faster ways to consume marijuana, but eating edibles takes longer to have an effect because the active compounds take longer to enter the bloodstream. In order to reach the brain and bloodstream, edible cannabis must pass through the stomach and liver. Nevertheless, once it enters the bloodstream, you are in for a treat!
The added benefit is that ingestion is far easier on your body than inhaling smoke into your lungs. However, the most significant advantage lies in the fact that you can choose any number of ways to ingest weed, and making your own DIY edibles can be an extremely enjoyable experience. The best part is that there is almost no limit to what you can make. In reality, it all depends on which fat you use to infuse your prepared cannabis with. For example, most baked goods will use butter as their base, while savory dishes are better made using oil such as olive or coconut oil, etc. So with all this in mind, what is the actual process to prepare your marijuana for cooking?
Preparing Your Weed For Cooking: The Process
Once you have decided to jump into the wonderful world of edibles, your first step is understanding the process of preparation. There are a few main steps that you will need to follow to achieve the best results, but fortunately, none of them are overly challenging.
Step 1: Activate It Via Decarboxylation
In order to get the most out of your marijuana when cooking, you need to activate it first by decarboxylating it. Activating cannabis involves heating and stimulating the THC to achieve the desired high. While cannabis decarboxylation might sound like a complex process, it simply consists in heating your cannabis to a specific heat for a certain amount of time. This creates a chemical reaction that converts tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) into psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). The process of decarboxylation can be done by heating the cannabis in an oven. You can do this by roughly chopping or grinding the buds onto an oven tray and baking it at 220°F for around 30 minutes. You will need to keep an eye on it to ensure that you don’t overheat or burn it.
Step 2: Choose A Fat
When you are cooking with cannabis, you need to infuse it with fat. Cannabis-infused oils and butter are popular methods of cooking cannabis into food. The reason why cannabis needs fat is that THC is fat-soluble. The cannabinoids bind to the fats and can be absorbed by your body when eaten. A perfect fat to infuse with cannabis is butter: creamy, flavorful, and used in most baking endeavors; it’s a great place to start. In any case, you can experiment with other fats depending on what you intend to cook.
One interesting idea would be to steep it in olive oil and then drizzle it over foods like salads or pasta. In fact, some people will simply infuse their decarboxylated cannabis in coconut oil and knock back a teaspoon and enjoy the effects. Of course, this is a supremely lazy and uninspired way, but if you’re not the best cook, it gets the job done!
Step 3: Understand Your Dosage
Due to the advent of store-bought edibles, the average cannabis consumer nowadays has a greater understanding of personal dosing. Finding the sweet spot and knowing the numbers of milligrams of THC in a gummy or mint is easier when you know exactly how much they contain. However, obtaining that same certainty can be challenging when you make your own cannabis-infused foods at home. Therefore, it’s best to do a little research and a little math before you begin your baking project. There is no magic THC milligram amount for each serving, but 5 to 10 milligrams is a good starting point. Nonetheless, you should always start low and build up as you become more proficient. Just remember that ingesting weed takes longer to produce effects than smoking it, so take your time and enjoy the process.
Cooking with cannabis is a fantastic way to experience your product differently. When you plan to cook cannabis, you must be aware of the pros and cons and do what is right for you. Despite this, if you are still planning on cooking cannabis and don’t know how, you can follow the tips in this post for incredible results.
