CBD has many advantages over other compounds, but one of the most notable is its flexibility. You can take your dose of CBD in a plethora of ways, from inhaling it through vapor to absorbing it through your skin. However, easily the most fun way to take CBD is as an edible, especially if you make your own edibles at home. Experts and experienced CBD users know the best methods for cooking with CBD without compromising on potency. The key is starting with the right CBD products and knowing how to manage them in the kitchen.
Cooking With CBD Tincture
CBD tinctures are made by infusing CBD in an alcohol solution. Often, CBD tinctures include a number of other beneficial herbs that enhance the relaxation, pain relief or anti-inflammatory effects of CBD. Tinctures come at a range of price points, depending on the quality of ingredients, but they tend to be accessible to essentially every level of CBD user.
Another benefit of tinctures is their ease of use. You can add drops of tincture to any food or drink, instantly adding a good dose of CBD to whatever you are about to consume. This makes creating edibles simple, straightforward and nigh instantaneous.
You can also mix tinctures into most recipes without seeing adverse effects on the end result. However, if you do use a CBD tincture in a recipe, you should be careful to avoid applying direct and high heat to anything containing the tincture. Heat tends to degrade the CBD, which means your homemade edible won’t be as potent as you might hope.
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Cooking With CBD Oil
It is important to recognize that not all oils behave the same way, especially in the kitchen. Most CBD oils consist of medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, which isn’t good for frying or baking the same way other culinary oils are. Instead, you need to be careful with how you introduce CBD oil into your food and drink, to ensure that the MCT oil doesn’t create any digestive issues and to avoid breaking down the delicate CBD.
The best strategy for using CBD oil in homemade edibles is adding a few drops of the stuff to finished meals, like salads and smoothies. Just as with tinctures, you don’t want to apply too much heat to a CBD oil; you should try to keep temperatures below 320 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the temperature at which CBD begins to degrade.
Additionally, if you want to up the dose of CBD in any food or drink, you would do well to invest in a CBD oil with a higher CBD concentration as opposed to merely adding more oil to your dish. The extra MCT oil can interfere with taste or texture, so you should be sparing with your application of it.
Cooking With High-CBD Cannabis Flower
There are a few different methods for using cannabis flower in home cooking. The easiest is to sprinkle dried, ground flower over your food and drink — but the intense, herbal flavor will likely overpower any dish it is used in.
A better solution is to infuse your own cannabis cooking oil, which is relatively easy and allows you to imbue any dish using oil with CBD. Cannabutter is a cannabis cook’s favorite ingredient, but you can also create cannabis-infused olive oil, coconut oil and others. It is also possible to infuse sweeteners with cannabis, so you can create canna-honey and canna-sugar for use in your kitchen.
It doesn’t take a Michelin-star chef to cook with CBD — but it does take some practice. Fortunately, once you get comfortable adding CBD products to your food and drink, you will enter a wonderful world of unlimited CBD edibles.
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