Although nothing beats smokin’ a j on a warm autumn day, sometimes burning herb isn’t an option. Some patients avoid smoking anything for a number of totally fair reasons. Other patients don’t want to smell like cannabis, while still others find the best relief from eating their weed rather than inhaling it.
You can buy edibles at pretty much every state-legal pot shop in the US. But sometimes premade edibles can be a bit pricey. And some customers have incredibly picky, selective diets, and the sugar-loaded edible selections available at most dispensaries may not vibe with their needs.
Or maybe you just like your edibles really, really strong. Much stronger than ones that are commercially or medically available.
If you meet any of these criteria, or if you just want to infuse your own homemade, homegrown recipes without all the hassle of whipping up a fresh batch of bud-infused butter each time — peep below!
Using Extracts for Easy Edibles
You can make edibles by skipping the two most attention-consuming steps: extracting with cooking oils, and calculating your dose. To do this, you’ll infuse your food with an extract (or concentrate, like hashish) instead of starting from scratch.
Starting with an extract like wax, shatter hash, distillate, or isolate comes with two major advantages. First, you don’t need to extract or decarboxylate your cannabis. So, that prevents a headache and a mess, as well as saves you time. Second, your dose has pretty much been measured out for you. If you’re working with legal product, check its label. The label should include THC content, reported either as a percentage or by the milligram.
Gallery — Edibles That Look Like Real Food Products:
To determine how much THC you have with a percentage, simply multiply the percentage by the total amount of extract you have – in milligrams. Since 1g is 1,000mg, the math is pretty simple: Just move the decimal point three digits to the right. So, if you’ve got 80 percent THC in 1g (1,000mg) of extract, you’ve got 0.80g (800mg) of THC on your hands.
Once you know how much THC you’ve got, determining how much is in each serving becomes incredibly easy. After thoroughly mixing the extract into your food and cooking it however you please, simply divide the number of servings by the total amount of THC. If you started with 800mg of THC and you made 20 brownies out of it, you should have, at most, 40mg THC in each brownie.
Keep in mind that the recommended recreational dose for any edible is 10mg THC. Adjust according to your tolerance. Also, since some THC will be lost during transfer (from weed container to spoon to food), you likely won’t have the maximum dose in every serving. Furthermore, since weed extracts are notoriously sticky, it may not evenly distribute throughout the edible. Some servings may be more potent than others, so munch responsibly.
Using Actual Weed for Easy Edibles
There’s another way to make edibles by skipping the calculation and extraction steps. You can simply bake or cook raw flower directly into your dish. Of course, this method won’t work for every type of edible — like weed shakes, for instance. But it works wonders for others, such as MERRY JANE’s Infused Firecrackers recipe.
If you go with adding actual weed to your edibles, be sure to decarboxylate the cannabis first. To do so, spread the ground buds across a baking sheet, and bake at 220–245°F for about 45 minutes. Afterward, you can add the baked weed to your food. This will infuse your edible with a heavy cannabis flavor, but with the right seasoning, sweetening, and other culinary tricks, you can mask or blend the weed flavor seamlessly into your food.
To measure your dose with flower, check the buds’ label. Again, if THC content is reported as a percentage, multiply that percentage to the total amount of flower you’re working with. You may need a small scale capable of measuring grams to correctly assess how much you’re dosing. Or, you can just go with the entire bottle and its given measurement (e.g. an eighth ounce of weed comes to 3.5 grams total).
And, as always, be sure to check your local laws before baking any (ahem) extra-special treats at home.
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