Posted by3 years ago
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Spread the cannabis on a piece of baking paper. Make sure there are no overlapping pieces of cannabis. Bake the cannabis at 250℉ for 25-30 minutes. Make sure not to open the oven too often. Decarbed cannabis should change its color from green to light brown. After 25-30 minutes, check your cannabis. It should be light to medium brown and should be very dry.
Edibles have become my favorite form of ingesting THC since moving to a legal state.
Pre-made edibles are amazing with their convenience, but incredibly pricey when doing the math.
(1g [$10] of 20% THC bud contains 200mg's of THC). An 'Incredibles' chocolate bar (100mg) which has shown to be the most consistently tested edible in Colorado still has a +/- 15mg variance, usually in the 85-90mg range. What it boils down to, is your paying $20-$25 for half a gram of weed infused in tasty chocolate.
Unfortunately everyone I talk to, be it online or in person (growers, budtenders, cannabis enthusiasts, etc) have a different preparations, temperatures, and time 'baked' as a suggestion to get the most THC activated by decarboxylation. Layman's terms, you can eat that weed and get stoned.
Through a lot of trial and error over the last two months I've come up with a preparation that works the best for me as far as potency goes. I have absolutely no lab data to back this up. Only my personal experience.
Let's get started:
Math is sufficiently important here to at least take a crack at it, so if you know what percentage of A-THC your bud contains, make it simple and convert the percentage to milligrams.
i.e. 1 gram at 20% A-THC = 200mg's
With this preparation you should expect to get in the ~90% range after decarboxylation. This again is speculation, and studied purely on my own intoxication effects.
i.e. A-THC = 200mg's before decarb; ~180mg's after decarb.
No recommended doses here, but 10mg's of THC has become the US' legal state's norm for a single serving dose to someone with no tolerance, to give you reference.
If you're still with me after the boring part, here's the fun part:
-Weigh out a gram of bud. It should be properly cured (dry; moisture will further decrease the THC amount in the final product).
-Pre-heat your oven to 220F. If you have a meat or candy thermometer, use that shit. 220F is the key here. Most ovens aren't calibrated properly I believe. Mine is running 20 or so degrees hot.
-Break up the bud as fine as possible. Surface area matters here and you want as much as possible. If you're used to a grinder, that's fine, maybe even recommended. I just prefer using my fingers because when the bud is properly cured for decarboxylation, it tends to crumble.
-Lay aluminum foil on the bottom of a pan/cookie sheet. I prefer to use a 13x9' dark aluminum pan.
-Spread your finely ground bud as evenly as possible on the foil. You don't really want any pieces of flower touching each other or clumped up.
-Cover the top of the pan, tightly, with more aluminum foil. It doesn't have to be airtight obviously, but wrap that sucker like it should be.
-Place your pan gently onto the middle rack of the oven once pre-heated and let bake for exactly 55 minutes. No more. No less.
-Pull out the pan carefully, remove the top foil layer, and inspect the weed. It should be extremely fragrant and slightly, very slightly brown. If you've ever vaporized weed, it should look about the same as far as color when it's done.
-Your weed is now decarbed, ready to eat and/or mix into your favorite food products!
*Do not use this decarbed weed to bake in cookies, brownies, etc. In those recipes canna-butter or canna-oil is needed. Heating the decarbed weed past 300F will start degrading the THC very quickly. CBD does start to activate at those temps which is great medicinally, but it degrades quickly as well and have no information on those preparations.
My favorite way to use this bud is by making chocolates. I just throw a bar of my favorite dark chocolate into a saucepan lined with parchment paper. Put that pan over a bigger pan with water (double boiler) in order to melt the chocolate.
Once melted, throw your bud in there and mix around until evenly distributed and covered.
Remove the parchment paper and place it on a steady surface. Shape the molten chocolate back into a bar as well as you can, divide by serving to your preferences. Math may be needed here again.
Final note, I wanted to post this because I constantly see people posting about firecrackers and until I started experimenting with decarboxylation the correct way, I thought they were awesome as well. They are a waste of your bud, ladies and gentlemen. You're getting maybe 50% of the available THC on a lucky day baking at 200F-300F for ~20 minutes inside a fat (or whatever similar preparation you use).
I'd love to hear how you guys feel about this preparation. If you think you have something better, please share! If you think what I posted is shit, let me know why.
Edit: Grammar
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