You’ve heard of pot brownies, but did you know you can bake almost anything with cannabis?
You don’t have to be an expert chef, either. There are so many ways to get the benefits of weed in your recipes.
Even if you’re brand new to cannabinoids, it’s easy to get started and hard to mess up. To get started, of course you’ll need the main ingredient — marijuana! You can buy weed online through WeedSmart.co, or if you’ve got a green thumb you can grow your own. The key for baking with weed is to start slowly, adding a little at a time until you know what to expect from each amount. As you get comfortable with using it, feel free to experiment with the dosages and strengths.
These quick tips will help you learn how to bake delicious meals and desserts with cannabis. You’ll quickly go beyond the traditional “pot brownie!”
1. Create Your Own Cannabutter
Your first go-to cooking ingredient as a cannabis baker should be cannabutter. It’s a simple recipe, and you can use it for everything from buttering your toast to sauteing and baking.
This recipe by Food Republic gives you a quick and easy way to make cannabutter. For the best results, start with a salted butter base to infuse with your cannabis.
Cannabutter can be refrigerated and frozen like regular butter, so go ahead and make a big batch while you’re at it!
2. Replace Unhealthy Oils with Cannabis Cooking Oil
Baking recipes almost always call for some sort of oil to keep the food moist. Adding cannabis to an oil base turns it into canna oil, with the flavor and effects of your preferred weed amount.
When you plan to cook regularly, it’s worth investing your time in making a batch of cannabis cooking oil. Because weed is oil-soluble, not water-soluble, your base should be a high-fat oil.
Vegetable oils are considered one of the most unhealthy kinds to use, so unless you have a favorite standby, try to avoid those as a base. Other oils, like coconut or olive, work well in almost every recipe.
3. Always Decarb Your Cannabis
Before you make canna-oil or cannabutter, you’ll need to “decarb” the marijuana you chose. The process of decarboxylation is the step that activates the CBD in your cannabis. Without it, you just have some finely ground plants seasoning your food.
To decarb the cannabis, you break down the buds into little pieces that can be ground after you’re done. Spread them evenly across a non-stick baking sheet or on wax paper. Bake the buds at 245℉ for 30-40 minutes, occasionally turning them.
You’ll know they’re done when they turn from their original green color to a more red/brown shade. Note that if your buds were harvested recently, they’ll take a little longer to decarb, whereas older buds will finish faster.
When you do this, the heat creates a chemical reaction similar to what you get when you smoke your weed. But instead of inhaling it, you’re ingesting it, and the effects begin to work as soon as it hits your digestive system.
4. Finely Grind Your Cannabis
To make your cannabutter or canna oil, your decarbed plant has to be ground and strained. The finer the grinds, the easier it is to cook with, and the more recipes you’ll be able to experiment with.
It doesn’t matter if you use just the flower or the rest of the plant; everything you want to add to your baking gets ground. The only time you don’t need to is if you plan on using pre-made oils and tinctures for your CBD component.
There are special cannabis grinders you can buy, but any fine-shredding herb grinder will work. Since it’s being used for cannabis, it should be kept away from being used to shred other things to avoid contamination.
When the cannabis is ground finely enough, you can use it for anything. You can even sprinkle it into your hot chocolate for an extra relaxing evening with this recipe from Veriheal.
Conclusion
The baking basics of using cannabis really do boil down to these four quick tips. All you need is to know how to decarb your buds and grind them finely. With the basic ingredients of cannabutter and canna oil, you can cook anything and add the benefits of cannabis to your meal!
