Just like cooking with regular ingredients, cooking with cannabis is a science. It revolves around one crucial process: infusing the cannabis into a fat (oil, butter, milk), which will produce cannabutter or canna oil. When cooking or baking, simply substitute this stuff in for the fat you would normally use in your recipe.
The reasoning behind using a fat as the binding ingredient is that THC, the chemical compound in cannabis responsible for the euphoric high, is extremely fat soluble, but almost wholly water insoluble. This means that fats will successfully break down the THC, enabling it to bind to the fat. That means that the weed — and you — will successfully get baked.
You also want to make sure and decarboxylate your marijuana. Raw cannabis contains TCHA, which is pretty much non-psychoactive, but applying heat to cannabis activates the psychoactive properties. This is called decarboxylation. When cooking, before infusing your cannabis in butter, many recommended heating your marijuana in the oven to decarboxylate and give the full effect. After decarbing, you can then make your cannabutter/cannaoil!
A Note On Dosing Edibles
Keep in mind how much you’re dosing. It wouldn’t be fun to eat a single brownie and then finding yourself baked for the entire day (unless that’s what you want, of course); and it would be equally unpleasant to have to eat a whole tray of brownies to feel something.
A general rule of thumb is to keep your ratio of THC (in milligrams) to butter around 10 mg per serving, or approximately 10 milligrams of THC to one teaspoon of butter or oil.
Here’s how you can determine the amount of THC in milligrams: weed is typically sold according to percentages of THC (you’ve probably heard of strains being 10, 15, 20 percent). So, if you have 100mg of weed, which is 10 percent THC, then that would yield 10 mg of THC.
