Thinking about whipping up some cannabis-infused edibles at home? Well, cooking with cannabis is not all that much different from whipping up your favorite recipe. However, cannabis must be much more carefully prepared and monitored than most other ingredients, making it somewhat more stressful and time-consuming to cook with. (If you’re looking for the easy button, stop by your favorite Have a Heart location for some pre-made goodies.)
4 Things To Know When Cooking With Cannabis
Cooking with cannabis is unlike cooking with most other ingredients. For instance, cannabis has to be prepared and activated before being added to your recipe. Plus, the kind of cannabis you choose can affect everything from the flavor to the potency to the effects of your final product. It pays to take a little bit of time to prepare yourself and your herb before cooking cannabis edibles. Here are 4 important things to know when cooking with cannabis.
Strains Matter
Strains matter just as much when enjoying edibles as when smoking cannabis. The strain you choose to infuse your edibles with will determine the exact effects that your edibles will have. Remember that indicas and sativas can produce wildly different therapeutic and mind-altering effects.
Furthermore, when making edibles, you should also carefully consider the flavor profile of the strain you are infusing. The specific terpenes and flavonoids inside of cannabis determine its flavor. Since each strain has a unique set of terpenes and flavonoids, you should make sure to check out the terpene profile of a strain before cooking with it. If a strain’s natural flavors don’t match up with the rest of the ingredients in your recipe, it may be a good idea to skip it and find something else.
Decarboxylate Your Cannabis Before Infusing It
There are several different ways to infuse cannabis into food. THC, the primary psychoactive cannabinoid in marijuana, is highly fat-soluble. This makes it a great addition to recipes involving fats like butter or oils. However, before it can be cooked up, cannabis should first be decarboxylated.
Decarboxylation is the process of converting the raw THCA that covers cannabis buds into psychoactive THC. This is done by grinding cannabis up and cooking it at temperatures of over 200℉ for between 30 and 60 minutes. Decarboxylating cannabis activates it, making it ready to be infused into whatever kind of recipe you wish to add it to. Make sure to do your homework on decarboxylation as it is one of the most important things to know when cooking with cannabis.
Keep an Eye on the Heat!
Get your temperatures and cooking times right. Knowing how long and at what temperature to decarboxylate and cook your cannabis is crucial to producing a tasty, potent edible. Overcooking your cannabis at any part of the process can damage or diminish its potency, making the final edible less impressive.
An Edible High Lasts Longer
Lastly, before you enjoy the fruits of your labor, be aware that the high produced by edibles lasts longer, and is believed to be more intense than the high produced by smoking. Whereas the effects of inhaled marijuana typically last for between 2-3 hours, the effects of edibles typically run for about 4-6 hours, and sometimes longer. Moreover, when it comes to edibles, many people tend to overindulge and consume too much, leading to the perception that they may be stronger or more potent than inhaled cannabis. However, this is untrue, if it feels like your edible high is coming on too strong, you probably just ate too much.
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