You’re a baking machine. You buy flour in 50-pound bags. Your sprinkles are organized by size, color, and shape. You know more about buttercream than most people know about their own children. Even if you’re just an average baker or just someone who’s handy in the kitchen, it seems like it should be pretty easy to figure out how to make edibles.
Now that medical marijuana is becoming readily available, the next logical step is to branch out and try to make your own edibles, right?
Making Medical Marijuana Edibles Takes Practice
First off, you can’t just throw a handful of your finest stash into the cake batter and call it a day. When you cook with weed, marijuana needs to be processed for two very important reasons.
First – processing unlocks the THC in marijuana, giving edibles their distinctively potent effects. Second – the human stomach isn’t a fan of eating the plant matter associated with a cannabis plant. Cows and goats may not mind, but if you eat a handful of weed, your stomach will let you know that you’ve made a bad choice, and the taste also leaves something to be desired.
Processing is a bit of an art in itself, and experienced cannabis cooks will definitely have their own preferred method of unlocking the psychoactive properties of THC.
Drying, curing, and heating the product will take up the bulk of the processing time and while it’s not difficult, it requires a bit of patience.
Then, you need to find a method for adding the THC to your recipe. Most popular among these (and there are more than a few) are infusing butters and oils which are easily incorporated into most recipes for baked goods.
Let’s skip forward through a whole semester of Weed Culinary Arts 101 and get right down to the real issue – Once you’ve got your weed processed and ready to incorporate into a recipe, then it should be pretty simple, shouldn’t it?
Getting Edibles Right
Here’s the catch – getting a precise level of THC into your recipe is beyond tricky. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “Of 75 products purchased (47 different brands), 17% were accurately labeled, 23% were under-labeled, and 60% were over-labeled with respect to THC content.” That means that just about 1 in 6 professionally produced edibles were labeled incorrectly, and that’s coming from the pros!
Working out of an amateur kitchen, it’s almost impossible to tell how much THC you’ve extracted from your buds via infusion into a butter or oil. Not only is it difficult to say what constitutes 100% of the THC content of your product, it’s hard to know how much THC your particular choice of oil, butter, or cream is going to draw out during the infusion process.
Then, are you willing to test your own baking skills – have you ever used a tablespoon instead of a teaspoon?
Between a naturally imprecise infusion process and natural human error, edible baking is more of an art than a science. In the end, you run a pretty high risk of not getting the relief you need or an equally high risk of getting way more THC than you bargained for, resulting in a very overpowering high.
Find a Dispensary Near You Instead!
In the end, we’re not going to tell you that flexing your culinary cannabis muscles in a strict no-no, but when it comes to medical relief, trying to get a perfect result is going to be tough.
Even if the pros are struggling with their accuracy, they’re still going to be far better at this than you. We recommend that you let them do the baking, just to be safe.
Learn more about edibles and how they can benefit you in our latest YouTube video!
