Not everyone wants to smoke cannabis—some people prefer to eat or drink it! Nowadays, it’s easy enough to enjoy pre-made edibles from stores like ours—but some people (ourselves included) love to cook.
In this simple guide, we’re going to introduce you to one of life’s great pleasures: Cooking with cannabis. We’ll teach you how to infuse common ingredients with cannabis to impart flavour and cannabinoids into your food. From there, we’ll give you tips on how to incorporate cannabis-infused ingredients into your food and some guidelines to keep in mind when you’re consuming edibles.
That’s a lot of information to cover, so let’s get started!
Infusing Butter, Oils, and Other Fats
Cannabinoids—those are the chemicals in cannabis like THC and CBD—can be readily absorbed by fats—sometimes called lipids. Butter and oil are two cooking staples; anything that you could cook with regular oil or butter can be cooked with canna-oil or cannabutter.
Here are the steps you’ll need to take to infuse your cooking fats with cannabinoids:
Decarboxylation
In flower form, cannabis contains THC, CBD, and other cannabinoids as acids—THCA and CBDA, for example. Decarboxylation turns these acids into THC and CBD, making them readily available for your cooking fats to absorb. Here’s how you decarboxylate your cannabis:
- Preheat your oven to 220°F
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper
- Break your flower into smaller pieces—do this by hand. Don’t use a grinder—too fine, and your buds could burn!
- Bake your bud for 20-45 minutes; you’ll want to opt to bake low-quality, very dry flower for about 20 minutes and bake the high-quality stuff for longer.
- Remove your decarbed flower from the oven. Let it cool, then grind it to about the consistency you’d use for a joint.
Infusing your butter or oil
Bon Appetit has an excellent guide to making cannabis butter—they’re culinary experts, and we think you’ll like what they wrote. Here’s an abridged guide:
For cannabutter or canna-oil:
- Add 1 ½ cups of water and 8 oz of oil or butter to a pot over low heat
- Wait for the butter to melt (if you’re using butter), then add your decarboxylated cannabis (half an ounce is usually right for the amount of butter or oil we’re using)
- Mix well, then cover
- Simmer for four hours, stirring about every half hour. The temperature should never exceed 180°F.
- Once cooked, strain with a cheesecloth and let cool. You can store it in an airtight container in your refrigerator if you’re not using it immediately.
Now that you’ve got your cannabutter or canna-oil, we can start cooking with it. Before we give you tips on that, though, here are a few factors to consider when choosing the right flower to cook with:
What kind of flower should I use?
For the recipe we gave, we recommend using about half an ounce. It’s important to remember, however, that the potency of the flower will change the potency of the butter or oil. Let’s break it down:
- 1 gram of 10% THC cannabis contains 100 mg of THC
- Cooking with half an ounce (14 grams) of 10% THC means 1400 mg of THC
- In the above recipe, we’d get 1400 mg of THC per 8 oz of butter.
- 8 oz of butter could make about 60 brownies. This means each brownie would have 23.3 mg of THC (1400 mg/60).
Keep potency in mind when deciding how much flower to infuse.
You should also remember that cannabis imparts its taste into whatever fat you’re using, so your cooking will taste like the cannabis you use—the more cannabis you infuse, the more the final product will taste of cannabis. Choose cannabis with terpenes that will impart a flavour complementary to what you’re cooking.
Finally, you should know that the calculations for CBD are the same as above.
Using Cannabis-Infused Products While Cooking
You might be tempted to sauté your onions in cannabis oil—that would be a mistake (depending on your preferences). Cooking cannabis-infused fats can start to remove their potency, and if you add them at the start of the cooking process, you may lose most of the cannabinoids you worked so hard to infuse!
Instead, opt to drizzle a bit of oil or butter on top of your pasta or salad—or whichever dish you’re cooking! When it comes to baking, you don’t have to worry—use cannabutter or canna-oil in the quantities the recipe asks for.
Things To Keep in Mind When Consuming Cannabis-Infused Food
Users often report that cannabis-infused food (and edibles in general) can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to kick in. Many users also find that the high from edibles lasts a lot longer, too—anywhere from 4 to 12 hours.
We hope this article has inspired you to try your own cannabis-infused cooking. Want more inspiration? Visit our marijuana store in Winnipeg—we’ve got pointers, a huge selection of flower to choose from, and more.
