THC Cooking: First Attempts (Part I)

Previous Encounters Were Not Pretty

Like many boomers who have tried marijuana in the past, I did not try it again until summer 2019 after it was legalized in Canada. I was quite reluctant at first because I could not tolerate the weed we smoked in the 1970s. There was no gradual progression like there is with beer or alcohol consumption: It was zero-to-sixty with just one or two puffs. I do not know how we would get stoned so quickly, considering that I did not actually see a marijuana bud until I bought some from the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation (NSLC) last year. All we seemed to be smoking in the 1970s was stems and leaves.

I finally decided to try some of the 'new weed' and had the chance last summer while sailing with @stephenking989. He showed me how to grind the bud and to use a vaporizer. I figured, based on my experiences in the seventies, that I would be on my ass after just a few tokes; however, it wasn't like that at all. All it did was produce a mellow feeling, but it also seemed to relieve my chronic back pain quite a bit after I took it.

So the next steps for me was to visit an NSCL outlet and pick some up. I started with some dry herb and a vaporizer, plus some CBD oil. The CBD oil would help with the pain, while the THC taken at bedtime would help relieve the pain, and my hope was that it would also enable me to sleep through the night without being unable to get back to sleep because of the loud ringing in my ears from Tinnitus.

It worked great because I was soundly sleeping through the night, and even if I did get up, I returned to sleep right away on coming back to bed. My wife tells me that she sometimes checks my breathing at night because I am so sound asleep. So that was working fine for me through the summer and fall, but I knew that I would need to come up with something before winter made it too uncomfortable to be outside vaping (thankfully I live in a smoke-free building).

As my luck would have it, a colleague gave me a sample of peanut butter brittle that one of her friends had made with THC, using the MagicalButter Machine. Well, I had to get one of those devices because I am loathe to be out in the cold vaping (I don't know how I ever made it as a smoker in Canada when I used to partake). I placed my order and started reviewing the receipies at MagicalButter.com . I started with the base recipes that would show me how to make the butter and tincture that I would need to use for baking and candy.

It is Magical

Well maybe not exactly magical, but the device is quite slick. It is designed to extract the goodness from the product without having to stand over a stovetop for hours simmering a pot of cooking weed. All the cook does is to add the butter or tincture base solution and the weed, set the temperate, and the time to cook, and then the machine does the rest. There is no need to grind the weed because the machine will grind, heat, and mix the butter or solution (alcohol, oil, vegetable glycerine, etc.) without the cook having to touch it until it is finished.

Ghee

Some of the recipes include chef notes and the notes in the magical butter recipe suggest:

For optimal extractions and maximum potency, based on extensive kitchen trials, our chef now recommends clarifying your butter before adding it to the pitcher. To clarify, gently melt and simmer the butter, discard the milk solids and surface foam, and retain the clear golden liquified butterfat.

I had heard of clarified butter before, but I had never had the need to use it, or more accurately, I did not know all the things I could do with it, given that it has a higher smoke-temperate than coconut oil. So it was off to TheGoogle to find out more about this, and I found a homemade Ghee recipe demonstrated by TwoSleevers Urvashi. I followed her directions in real-time and my Ghee turned out perfect. It was time to start cooking!

Activating the goodness--Decarboxylation

Before doing any cooking with either butter or a tincture I needed to activate the THC or CBD in my product. The MB site gives a great explanation of how heat activates the psychoactive and analgesic properties in the marijuana through decarboxylation. As I got going with it, I was feeling a bit like the weed-version of Breaking Bad's Walter White. It was a little surreal cooking this stuff in my kitchen, because it doesn't seem that long ago that in the 1970s Canadian military members were jailed for having as little as a few marijuana seeds trapped in a shirt pocket seam. We have come a long way.

For my first couple of attempts I used our kitchen oven, but it takes exceedingly long to come up to temperature, even though I am not using that much heat to activate the THC, and once at temperature, it is difficult to regulate.