How to make Canna-butter using concentrates! I like to bake and I like to eat infused baked goods so canna butter is kind of a staple in the house. I usually use dry flower to make my canna butter and its a bit of a process. There is a fair bit of prep time spent clarifying and a lot of clean up involved but I’ve always enjoyed my end product. This time I decided to try something different. I’m using a concentrate.
Concentrates kind of intimidate me. They are potent, most often tools are required to use them and dosing is a delicate process. I’m not a particularly delicate individual so I’m slowly going to edge me way into understanding concentrates on my own terms. What I like about concentrates is that they contain all of the cannabinoids and terpenes with out the mass. Depending on the extraction process I can end up with a full expression of a flower or I can get access to a distillate. I also like that there is much less odour associated with both consuming and cooking with concentrates.
There are many brands and styles of concentrates but the differences really come down to the extraction method used to create said concentrate. Either the extraction method is mechanical using heat and or pressure OR its a chemical process using a solvent of some sort. Remember… water is a solvent so not all solvents are harmful. Most extracts are not activated meaning you still need to apply heat to convert the THCA to THC in the extract. The outlier is the distilled concentrate, those are activated during the distillation process.
I have tried dabbing a handful of times and I fully respect the process. Because the products are concentrated you have to be extra mindful about dose. Speaking of dose, I like that using regulated concentrates gives me an accurate accounting of the potency I’m about to connect with and for this particular product the potency information made my canna butter process really satisfying. Here’s how it went.
Ingredients:
- Unsalted Butter
- Greybeard Kish Live Resin Terp Slush
- Sunflower Lecithin
NOTE: Kish is Shiskaberry crossed with DJ Short’s Blueberry and boy does it smell good.
First I removed the Terp slush from its package (no easy task) and placed it on a piece of parchment paper. I then placed the parchment paper inside my silicone decarbing box that I use to decarb flower. If you don’t have a silicone box you can use a pyrex dish with a lid or even a mason jar. Decarbing is what you do to activate the THC by exposing it to heat. Ideally you will use a container with a lid so that you can hold on to as many terpenes as possible as they tend to off-gas fairly quickly. This process involves placing the concentrate in the oven at 200 degrees for 20 mins. Once the decarb is done set the concentrate aside to cool…leave the lid on!
Next set up a double boiler. I don’t own one so I put water at the bottom of a saucepan and placed a metal bowl into the pan. I set a small about of butter into the bowl and placed the activated concentrate in the pan as well. I slowly melted the butter and continued stirring until the concentrate was fully dissolved into the butter. I then added butter in 1/4 cup increments continually stirring to make sure the concentrate was fully and evenly dispersed. Once all of the butter was melted I added 2 teaspoons of sunflower lecithin-again, stirring until the lecithin was fully blended. The lecithin is not necessary but it is thought to enhance the absorption of the THC in the bloodstream so I like to add it when making butter. I don’t usually use lecithin when I make coconut oil because it has a really high fat content and cannabinoids love to bind to lipids!
Once the butter was fully blended I poured equal amounts into a silicone mold. My mold is a silicone mold with had 6 oversized ice cube wells… so this is how I did my math!
My concentrate had 724 mg of THC. My 454 grams of butter was divided into 6 equal sized portions. 724 divided by 6 is 120
Its not 100% accurate. I might not have accessed all 724 mg of the THC during the decarbing process and my cubes are not identical so this is not a fool proof process. That said it is a far cry from making cannabis from flower where the extraction process is much less accurate. The math on dry flower is decent when you are using tested product but you are always making guesses around how much of that potential THC you have actually captured. At the end of the day I’m comfortable with this ballpark assumption.
I’m going to use these little cubes over the holidays because with my math I’m coming up with 6 batches of 12 cookies at 10mg THC each! They may also make their way into gift bags for friends who like to do their own baking. Let the holiday baking begin!
