Cooking with Marijuana

Eating Marijuana is an alternative to smoking it.

Cooking with Marijuana has its own advantages:

Eating it versus smoking it

When cannabis is smoked, the effect is almost instantaneous. Most of the high is usually felt right away.

The high from smoking usually lasts from one to two and a half hours. It can be recaptured when it is waning by taking a few more tokes.

When Cannabis is ingested, a person must wait thirty minutes to an hour and a half before the first stages of the high are even noticed. After this, the euphoric state continious to increase. It may than last from four to eight hours and longer.

This long high can be of great value to a person who is going to be in a place where he cannot converniently re-stone himself with the difficult-to-conceal smoke.

If the cinema-goer ingests rather than smokes his pot, he can stay deliciously high even through an entire 3 hour movie. Upon arriving home, he'll still feel like the main charactar in 'Avatar' on his dragon.

One advantage of smoking is that it is virtually impossible to overdose in this manner. If a person has smoked too much he will either stop or pass out.

Cooking with Marijuana means one may eat ten times too much and still be eating before the first efffects of the high arrived. If he does so he may eventually loose consciousness for anywhere from 12 to 48 hours.

We generally recommend that the average gourmet excercises some caution when trying to determine the outer limits of his drug tolerance by cooking with Marijuana.

Getting the most out of it

In order to get the best and most economical result out of cooking with marijuana, we must keep in mind some facts about the physical and chemical nature of cannabis.

Solubility of Cannabis

THC, the active substance in grass and hash is not soluble in water. It is soluble in oils, fats and alcohols. Read the page about Marijuana Tea if you are interested in making an alcoholic marijuana drink.

That is why most recipes usually require that the ganja is sauteed in butter before combining it with the other ingredients.

It does not work to boil the leaves, seeds and stems of Marijuana in water and drinking the result. A high will not arrive.

Generally, in order to achieve the best results, the recipe should involve any of the following:

Soaking or boiling the cannabis in alcohol; sauteing or boiling in oil or butter; combining, unheated with oil or butter; combining, heated or unheated with an oil/water emulsion such as milk.

Milk contains butter fats with water. Cannabis Material can be boiled in milk and will dissolve into these fats.

Effects of cooking on Cannabis

What is the effect of cooking heat on cannabis? Will it destroy the potency?

Gottlieb (1993) writes that there is no apreciable loss of potency from cooking. Normal cooking temperatures are not high enough to burn or destroy the active ingredients.

He further states that "In many instances, it is possible that cooking will increase the potency of Marijuana".

In freshly harvested hemp, much, and sometimes all of its THC, is present in the form of tetrahydrocannabinolic acid.

The acid is not psychoactive, but upon drying and curing much of it converts into active THC. That is part of why it won't make very stoned to eat fresh Marijuana leaves or buds.

Most of the THC-Acid will convert to psychoactive THC within 2 years by a process called decarboxylation. Unfortunately, THC will also get lost during this time due to oxidation when in contact with oxygen.

The application of heat can further transform inactive THC acids to psychoactive THC in the dried product.

If cannabis material is heated to about 212 °F (100 °C) for 75 minutes in an oxygen free environment, all of these acids will convert to THC.

Traditional cannabis Recipes often call for the sauteing of the ganja in oil or butter before using it. The oil protect the product from the oxygen while the heat activates the THC.

Cannabis Butter

Many baking recipes use Cannabis Butter as basic ingredient. E.g. this recipe for Marijuana Brownies

or

this recipe for Marijuana Cookies.

To make butter, read how to make marijuana butter.

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