Marijuana

Smoking’s bad for you, kids. Luckily, it’s never been easier to make your own edibles. There’s a lot of different methodologies for making them. I’ve tried a few: decarboxylate + stovetop simmer, slow cooker, etc. and all of them produced a product that tasted fine and got me high. There is, however, one clear winner: the sous-vide (immersion circulator) method.

Immersion circulator (or water-bath) edibles

Decarboxylate your cannabis in the oven by grinding it, spreading it out into an even layer over foil on a baking sheet, and baking for 110 minutes at 230F/110C.

1. In a vacuum seal-able bag, add a ratio of one-pound butter to one-ounce decarboxylated cannabis. Seal the bag.

2. Set your sous-vide circulator to 180F/82C. Alternatively, heat a water bath to 180F/82C and carefully maintain that temperature.

3. Cook your butter bag for 6-8 hours.

4. Cool the butter bag (we put it on an aluminum tray)

5. Unseal the bag and strain out the loose cannabis from your butter using several layers of cheesecloth. Squeeze out butter from your loose cannabis if you can be bothered to do so.

6. Store your butter indefinitely in the freezer.

7. When portioning cannabutter, always portion vertically. Solids sink in the liquid butter as it freezes and forms layers. Portioning horizontally will give you even more wildly inaccurate dosages.

How do I dose my edibles?

It’s basically impossible to accurately dose edibles at home. We can still try, however, and the wildly inaccurate napkin-math numbers that you can estimate should help guide you to finding a dose that’s comfortable for you.

Find the THC% or THCA% of your marijuana. If THCA is explicitly listed, take 88% of that percentage as your THC%. 1Oz is 28349mg. I used bottom-shelf shake (discard cannabis) at 15% THC. 15% of the dry weight of our 28349mg cannabis is 4252mg total THC to be extracted. Typically, butter extraction is anywhere from 30-60% (more wild variation, wheeee!) efficient. Let’s be optimistic, and assume half of the THC (2126mg or 50%) makes it into the butter.

The minimum recommended dosage for someone without a cannabis tolerance is about 10mg. People with strong tolerances will casually take 200mg+. I take what I estimate to be about 30mg as a regular user, which gets me a ~6 hour somewhat intense high. 2126mg/100mg = ~71 portions. Assuming you’re purchasing your shake in bulk at rock-bottom prices (~40$CAD/oz for me), and your butter at a random grocery store premium (4$/lb), you can make some insanely potent 100mg edibles for as cheap as 2.09$CAD each: a price competitive to smoking.