I recently made my first batch of canna-butter and I think it turned out pretty awesome. For the recipe, I looked up a bunch of different ways to make it and decided to go with the crock pot method.
I used a high CBD strain because I wanted to use this butter more as a therapeutic recipe for pain and not one to feel a high. I wanted to make something that I could cook breakfast with and still be able to function normally for the next 6 hours or so.
So with all of the research and stuff I had been doing, I found out that decarboxylation is the most important first step when making canna-butter. But what is decarboxylation? "Decarboxylation is the process that activates compounds in cannabis such as THC"source
So basically, if you don't decarb your weed before you cook with it, you won't get any of the effects from the different cannabinoids and if you do get any, it will be minimal compared to if you had decarbed the weed.
I took about 3.5 grams of flower and then grinded it up and laid it out on a piece of parchment paper and then set it in the oven on 220 degrees. I read that with a high CBD strain, you need to leave it in the oven longer than a high THC strain, so I had it in the oven for about 60 minutes.
I had never really cooked with weed before, so I wasn't sure how much this small amount would make my house smell, but about 10 minutes in the oven and my house started to smell like a dispensary. I didn't really mind the smell at all, but I was hoping that no one would come to my door while I was cooking because the smell just got stronger and stronger throughout the day.
After my weed was done in the oven, I poured it into a mixture of 1 cup of water and 4 sticks of butter. The water is in there to remove some of the impurities once everything is finished because the butter and water separate as the butter cools off.
I cooked it in the crock pot on low for about 5 hours and stirred the mixture every 30 minutes or so. I want to get a crockpot that I can set an exact temperature on so I can make sure not to burn the butter and make it too hot. I read that about 160 degrees is what you want to have the temperature at while it cooks. Everything I read said to go as slow as possible with it and the longer it cooks, the better because more of the cannabinoids are released into the oils.
When it was done cooking, I poured it all into a container and set up my cheesecloth on the container that I was going to store the butter in. As you can see, there is a bunch of shit on the bottom and you need to make sure to get rid of all the pieces of weed too.
After I strained it through the cheesecloth, I set it in the fridge overnight so it can cool off. By the time it had cooled off in the morning, there was a layer of hard butter on the top of the watery liquid underneath, so I dumped the watery shit out and then slowly heated the butter up again and strained it through another cheesecloth and then cooled it again so there wasn't any liquid left in it.
Making canna-butter is pretty straight forward and a lot easier than I thought it would have been. It is just a time consuming process and you need to be prepared for the smell because my home smelled like weed for a couple days after. Most of the recipes called for about an ounce of weed to go into the butter, but I only did the 3.5 grams because I am still learning and messing up with an ounce of weed is a pretty expensive mistake to make.
I have used the butter on my waffles in the morning and I could feel a nice relief from some of my back pain. Last night I made popcorn and used probably about 4 tablespoons of the butter and all my pain was gone and I had a nice body high, without any of the head high that I would normally feel from edibles.
Overall, it was a pretty fun experience to make my own canna-butter. I am looking forward to getting more into cooking with my weed and seeing what I can create.
Thanks for taking the time to stop by. If you have any cool recipes for cooking with cannabis, let me know and I will see if I can make it.
