Special offer: Learn to make edibles with Chef Cheri Sicard

Cheri Sicard has heard nearly every question and problem imaginable when it comes to cooking with marijuana, from over or under dosing edibles, to what is the best temperature for activating potency, to what to do with a batch of burnt bud butter. The misinformation and “alternative facts” about cooking with marijuana can be daunting for consumers to sift through. That’s why Sicard set out to take the mystery away with her new online course, Cannabis Cooking for Home Cooks.

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“Once you understand the fundamental principles and building blocks of how to cook with marijuana, including proper cooking temperatures and how to infuse the plant’s medicinal properties into foods in the proper amounts, the rest is just basic cooking,” Cheri says.

With over two hours of video instructions and demonstrations, plus text lectures, quizzes, and resources, Sicard tried to answer the all questions she regularly receives via her blog and Facebook page. In fact she credits the constant stream of email questions from would-be cannabis cooks from all over the world as her inspiration for creating the course.

Cannifornian readers can get a free preview of the class — including access to Cheri’s online dosing calculator — by clicking here.

Here’s a sample of Cheri’s expertise, in the form of an article she wrote for The Cannifornian about measuring your dosing for edibles:

Dosing for Marijuana Edibles

Without question, the biggest area of concern and confusion when it comes to cannabis cooking is dosing. That’s because people respond to edible marijuana drastically differently.

While the 10 mg THC per serving cap proposed by the California state Department of Public Health might be perfectly reasonable for some, others will need 50 mg, 75 mgs, 100 mgs or more. If these misguided regulations go through, making your own edibles at home will be the best option for consumers who need or want more potency from their edibles.

Commercial edible makers rely on lab testing, but this is not an option for the average home cannabis cook. Not only would it add hundreds of dollars to the cost of a batch of edibles, you’d be using most of that food as testing samples.

For most home cooks, determining how much marijuana to use involves balancing factors such as plant strength and tolerance levels of the people consuming the edible. But there is a formula you can use to get a pretty close approximation of how many mgs of THC is in each serving of your home made edibles, even when the plant matter you are using has not been lab tested. Is it foolproof? No because THC levels can vary widely, but it will give you a pretty good idea. If, on the other hand, you are cooking with cannabis that HAS been lab tested you can use this same formula to calculate even more precisely just how many milligrams of THC and even CBD per serving your homemade edibles contain.

I’m going to explain the formula here, but you don’t have to worry about doing the math or memorizing it. I created a handy Free Marijuana Dosage Calculator tool that does all the work for you. To get access, sign up for my free 10 minute online dosing class that will teach you how to use it anytime you cook with marijuana.

First step: Estimate the THC percentage of the cooking material

For the sake of argument, let’s say that you do not know how much THC is in the plant material you are using to make marijuana butter or oil, as most people won’t.

A US government study in 2009 says the national average is 10%, however we know that not all marijuana is created equal.

Reports say the government grown cannabis, that is grown at the University of Mississippi and supplied to researchers, tops out at a measly 3% THC. On the other end of the spectrum, a 2015 Colorado study that analyzed 600 samples from that state saw some top shelf strains containing a whopping 30% THC.

If you are cooking with schwag – low quality brick weed, or with government weed, use a THC content closer to 3% to start your estimate. If on the other hand, you know that your plant material is more potent than typical, you might want to start your estimate with a number higher than 10.

But since Uncle Sam says average marijuana contains 10% THC, that’s what we will use in our example. It’s also a nice round number that makes it easier for people who are mathematically challenged to grasp the concept.

Step two: The formula

Here’s how to determine how much THC is in that bath of homemade edibles:

1 gram of cannabis = 1000 milligrams
10% of 1000 milligrams is 100 milligrams

This means that, assuming we are using “average” marijuana with 10% THC, 1 gram of cannabis contains 100 milligrams of THC.

Step three: Are you with me so far?

Next, let’s calculate how many milligrams are in a batch of marijuana butter or oil. As an example, let’s say I used 1 ounce, or in the stoner metric system 28 grams, of average quality marijuana to make 1 cup of butter. That would mean 2800 milligrams of THC went into that 1 cup of butter.

Moving on, the amount of THC in a given recipe will depend on the amount of butter used. Say I took 1/2 cup of that butter to make a batch of cookies that yields 36 cookies. If 1 cup butter= 2800 milligrams, then 1/2 cup butter will contain 1400 milligrams. If we divide 1400 by the number of servings, in this case 36, we can determine that each cookie will contain about 38.8 (let’s round it down to 35 since this is an estimate) milligrams of THC. I rounded down instead of up because it’s nearly impossible to convert 100% of the THC in your cooking, so the final tally will always be a little less.

So to recap, first you need to estimate the percentage of THC in your plant material (or use the numbers from the lab test) and divide that into 1000 to get the per milligram amount. Next calculate the number of milligrams in your infusion, and in the amount of infusion you will use to make your recipe. Divide that by the number of servings your recipe makes and you will know the per serving dose.

You can use this formula to adjust your recipes to always insure you are carrying a cannabis dose that meets your specific needs. If you find a recipe gives you too strong a dose, cut the amount of cannabutter or oil and substitute the rest with uninfused butter or oil to make up the difference. Dose not strong enough? Augment your recipe with some decarboxylated kief, hash, or hash oil.

I hope you grasp the dosage calculation concept. If not, don’t worry, click here to sign up for my free dosing class for another example and access to the dosage calculator tool that will do all the work for you.