Mistakes to Avoid When Cooking With Cannabis
Contents
Cooking with Homegrown Cannabis
How to Avoid the five Common Mistakes
Flawless Canna Cooking
Need a break from the puff but still want the good cannabis stuff? Learn how to cook with marijuana for stronger and longer-lasting effects—without the mistakes.
As you’re aware, preparing a dish or edibles containing cannabis entails a specific process. It isn’t as simple as adding your curated buds to pasta, a shake, or a chocolate brownie. Well, you can, if all you want is some garnishing.
Just as you can’t feel the effects before puffing on your favorite buds—you can’t make edibles for the best effects before heating those nugs. Every step of the process depends on each other. Even if you want the medicinal benefits from your edibles with buds harvested and curated from CBD-only seeds—they need to be heated.
Whether you’re trying out weed in your cooking for the first time or not, avoid the most common mistakes when preparing cannabis for edibles.
Cooking With Homegrown Cannabis
Cannabis certainly is a versatile herb—from seed to using it in edibles, all it needs is attention and planning. As with any first-time recipe, flops happen, with cooks asking, “can I use burnt weed for edibles?”. Overheating marijuana is an avoidable mistake that happens often.
While getting the most important parts of the process right, it’s also vital to choose the right cannabis strain. There’s no point trying to put weed into a chocolate cake that makes it taste like diesel. The same goes for the effects you expect to feel from consuming your edibles.
It’s important to know the cannabinoid levels, flavors, and aromas to calculate your dosages for each serving.
Learning how to cook with marijuana allows you to benefit from the use of this herb without smoking it. Try out some weed desserts—taking comfort food to a whole new level of blissful relaxation.
Before getting cannabis-wise in the kitchen, avoid these mistakes and make yourself some top-notch edibles.
How to Avoid the Five Common Mistakes
Mistakes happen, especially as you learn how to cook with marijuana. With a word like “decarboxylation,” it’s easy to forget that it’s the first and most vital step. Get these five things right the first time for some real soul food.
Decarboxylate Your Marijuana
If you’re a first-time chef trying out weed in your food, you should probably know that decarboxylating your cannabis is the first and most vital step. The cannabinoid compounds like THC and CBD aren’t activated without this process, so your buds are psychoactive or healing-free.
Various methods are available to successfully decarb your weed, with the oven one being the favorite. To avoid ever asking, “can I use burnt weed for edibles?” apply the right amount of heat during decarbing. Whereas roasted cannabis isn’t entirely inedible, it weakens the most beneficial cannabinoid.
A quick rundown to decarb your cannabis is to line a baking tray with parchment paper while preheating your oven to 250℉. Evenly sprinkle your cured cannabis over the paper, cover with foil, and bake for approximately 45 minutes. Stir the buds every 15 minutes throughout to activate the compounds evenly.
Strain Your Canna Oil/ Butter Properly
Trying to take weed out of your canna-oil or butter requires patience and precision. After making your infusion, the first instinct is to squeeze out all the oil with all your might. Don’t do this. Excess pressure only allows plant matter to seep through the cheesecloth material. Any parts of the flower that goes into your infusion give it a rough texture.
Don’t Overgrind Your Cannabis Powder
Adding fine powders seems like the best way to incorporate cannabis when trying out weed recipes. Avoid grinding your decarboxylated weed too fine. It adds an unpleasant grassy flavor to your edibles.
It also makes the canna-oil or butter greener than you’d prefer and more difficult to strain the plant matter. The ideal consistency of your marijuana is like that of coarse salt.
Add the Right Amount of Cannabis And Stir, Stir Stir!
If you’re learning how to cook with a marijuana strain you haven’t smoked before, you’d probably need to before including it in your foods. Knowing the potency of the cultivar you’re using allows you to add just the right amount to your cooking. Too much marijuana adds an unpleasant flavor to your food.
Trying weed-infused edibles with little to no psychoactive or medicinal properties is rather disappointing. It’s also vital to evenly distribute the cannabis oil or butter by thoroughly stirring it into your dishes. The imbalance often leads to half the meal dosed in THC or CBD and the other having none.
Cook Your Edibles at the Right Temperature
At what temp can you cook weed edibles? Don’t exceed temperatures of 325℉. Exposing your cannabis to extreme heat kills all the good compounds, reducing potency and flavor. It’s the main reason why decarboxylating marijuana is done low and slow. Remember, cannabis oil must never boil, even when frying.
Flawless Canna Cooking
So there you have it, knowing how to cook with marijuana without the avoidable mistakes leaves you with tasty edibles that make you feel good. Add your cannabis to anything, but you have to heat it first.
Trying out weed edibles is even more rewarding when you’ve grown your marijuana from seed. You’ll have an endless supply of buds for the making and knowledge about the strain.
Start growing to stock your pantry with high or low THC or CBD buds—something for every occasion.
Douglas Kester
Douglas Kester, a cannabis growing expert at I49 Seed Bank. He has been working in the weed industry for more than 10 years. During that period, he built up a vast experience and depth of expertise in this field. Douglas has a detailed understanding of every aspect of marijuana, from its cultivation and species to the effects it brings. He’s also up to date on all the cannabis-related legislation nuances.
