Cooking with Cannabis is a great way to ingest the plant without having to smoke it. Cannabis infused butter, also known as cannabutter, is the easiest way to create edibles, although making it for the first time may be a bit difficult.
If you’re not familiar with decarboxylation, this is the process in which THC changes from it’s acid form to it’s psychoactive from. In order to allow the THC in your cannabis to decarboxylate correctly you have to heat your cannabis slowly over a long period of time (to read more about decarboxylation, check out our post about it here).
If this process sounds complicated, don’t worry, it’s not! Here’s a step by step guide on how to create cannabis infused butter.
Ingredients
1 lb (4 sticks) of unsalted butter
1 cup of water
1 ounce of ground cannabis (note: you can also use leftover cannabis vapings!)
1 sauce pan
1 glass refrigerator safe container
Cheesecloth or one of these handy straining bags
Large or vinyl gloves
Instructions
First, put the gloves on. Cannabutter can be incredibly messy and the finished product can be very potent, so you’re going to want to be careful when handling it! Next, take a sauce pan and add the butter and water and let it simmer on low. You want to add water because it will help keep the temperature where you need it to be for the process of decarboxylation to occur, plus it prevents your other ingredients from burning.
Once the butter begins to melt, add all of your ground cannabis. Continue letting the cannabis, butter, and water simmer on low heat for the next 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally. Very important note: Do not let your simmer turn into a boil! It will cause the cannabis to get too hot and will cook all your product.
While your product is simmering is the best time to prepare everything you need to do next. Take your glass container and cheesecloth and drape the cheesecloth over the container, placing the rubber band to secure the cloth in place. Set aside, and let your mixture simmer on low.
Once you’ve allowed the mixture to simmer for about 3 hours, put some gloves on and grab your container that is covered with cheesecloth and pour the mixture over the cheesecloth slowly. If you have a fine mesh strainer you can use that instead of the cheesecloth. Be careful, the melted cannabutter is really hot and stings when splashes touch your skin.
Allow the plant leftovers to be strained by the cheesecloth, remove the rubber band and squeeze any remaining butter out of the product and cheesecloth. If you are using a strainer, you can press on the product with your gloved hands to get excess butter out. Once you’re sure you have everything out, go ahead and discard the leftover ground cannabis.
If you look at your mixture you will see that the butter and water begin to separate. Cover your container and place it into the freezer until it has hardened. Once hardened, the water will be frozen underneath the cannabutter.
You may notice that your cannabutter looks green, and it should! Scrape the cannabutter off of the water and store in a container in your refrigerator or freezer.
