Cooking with Marijuana: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid

In this guide, we’re looking at cooking with cannabis and how you can get things wrong – a lot of people tend to make one of these common mistakes when they are cooking with marijuana.

Cooking with marijuana has become a lot more popular as weed becomes more common and accepted around the USA, with a cannabis dispensary in most big cities in some states! If you make a mistake you can ruin the whole batch or you can end up with an uneven potency. You might even make marijuana lose all of its potency.

Throwing Ground Cannabis Straight in The slow-cooker

If you are going to try cooking with weed then you need to decarboxylate marijuana. This means that you shouldn’t put raw cannabis flowers straight into the dish you are making as it tastes bad but also hasn’t properly activated, so you will basically be wasting the cannabis.

A lot of people know that you need to process this in the oven first in order to decarb the oil. A long soak in a slow cooker means that you can’t control the temperature as well and when making your weed popcorn or weed brownies, you will have far more control in the oven.

Heating and decarbing at the wrong temperatures

This leads us to the next point nicely. So many people heat their flowers at the wrong temperatures before cooking with cannabis. This means that you are not getting the full effect.

The right way to do things is to heat the oven to around 245 degrees F, and cook for between 30 and 40 minutes, with a mix every 8-10 mins to ensure that it is getting evenly cooked. This will activate the marijuana ready for cooking.

Grinding your cannabis into a powder

If you grind too finely then you might end up with an unpleasant flavor, sort of like a grassy flavor and not in a good way. The grind is vital, so try not to get it too fine, use a coffee grinder on a more coarse setting if you are unsure of how to prepare your product for cooking with marijuana.

Cannabinoids (CBD & THC) will bind to the fats in the oil and they will do so more easily if you grind coarsely. If you don’t it can pull plant materials in that you simply don’t want to end up in your cannabis cooking.

Baking too little oil into your dish

It’s really tough to check the potency of marijuana sometimes before you actually consume the cannabis oil that you are using for cooking. Some people make edibles at home when cooking with weed and end up unsure if it is going to be the strongest edible ever or have no potency at all. A small test can be run to see how potent it is. Okay, so it isn’t that scientific, but a decent test is to take a small dose of the oil yourself, wait a while, and see the effects. Use this as your benchmark for how much needs to go in the batch overall. That way you won’t end up giving incredibly potent edibles to your guests either, that’s just bad weed etiquette!

Uneven distribution of potency in an infused batch

When cooking with marijuana you need to ensure that any mixes are done properly, or even that the oil is added to individual potions or cupcakes, rather than one larger cake. This is just an example, but if you don’t mix and distribute the oil properly then one serving may end up with all of it rather than each serving having enough to cause a gentle but effective high. Use a food processor if you need to, and ensure that the cannabis is properly, evenly distributed among the cooking you are doing.

Conclusion

It’s possible to make errors when cooking with cannabis, and it isn’t that scientific, at least not for the hobbyists out there. The main thing is to try and make your cooking with weed as consistent as you can to ensure that it doesn’t have an incredible potency, or otherwise that it does virtually nothing when it is consumed. Striking the balance is key.