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Cook Your Edibles on Your Own

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Hemp is a very healthy plant to add to your diet. The leaves and flowers provide protein, fiber, antioxidants and many vitamins and minerals. Ingesting it either raw or cooked is much healthier than smoking. While there are many ways to eat raw hemp that won’t get you high, these tips focus on first activating the CBDs by decarboxylating and then infusing the hemp for cooking. One benefit of making your own edibles are the ability to handpick the strain, the ingredients and the potency to create high-quality edibles that won’t break the bank.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the physiological reaction that happens when ingesting hemp is different than smoking it. THC is converted in the liver to 1-OH-THC, which is more potent than when you smoke (Delta-9 THC), and leads to a more intense and longer-lasting high. Always start low with dosing edibles and go from there. A good first dose would be around 5mg. Wait at least an hour to decide if you like the effect. Furthermore, it’s never been easier to calculate the potency of each dose, thanks to online dosage calculators.

Let’s get to the basic tips for making your own high-quality edibles at home.

Use Quality Bud

When you are ingesting weed, it’s important to know what distinguishes high-quality bud from the low-quality bud. A few factors to be on the lookout for: a pungent aroma (avoid any buds that smell hay-ish or have a faint scent), green buds (as opposed to yellow or tan plants), the structure of the bud (indica buds should have a tight, dense appearance while sativa buds should have a light, fluffy appearance). the growing conditions and any pesticides or chemicals used. Not only can those chemicals affect your health, but they can also impact the taste of your edibles.

Make Sure It’s Fully Baked

In order to activate the effects of weed, you need to decarboxylate it, or heat it, to activate the CBDs. In technical lingo? The uncooked weed plant contains THC-A c acid which will not get you high. The CBDs in flower all contain an extra carboxyl group (OOCH) on the end of their chain, which decarboxylation removes so that the CBD can bind to your body’s receptors. To break it down in layman's terms: raw weed plants need to be heat-treated to remove the part of the chemical chain that blocks CBD from doing its job.

Baking lightly ground bud in the oven at 240 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 to 40 minutes should do it. Stir every 10 minutes or so to activate the most surface area.