Kitchen
Why food is harder than a drink
The appeal of cooking with THC is obvious and the reason this section is small is equally obvious: a can states its dose on the side and a tray of brownies does not, and four separate things move the number between the bottle and the plate.
Heat degrades it, unevenly
THC breaks down with heat and time. That is not a fixed percentage you can subtract, because it depends on temperature, duration, whether the fat was covered, and where in the oven the pan sat. Anyone who gives you a tidy conversion factor for this is guessing.
Practical consequence: you cannot compute an outcome dose from an input dose once heat is involved. You can only measure the input and accept that the output is lower by an unknown amount. That is a bad position to plan an evening from.
Fat concentrates it, and fat does not distribute evenly
THC is lipophilic. In a batter, it goes where the fat goes, and the fat in a mixing bowl is not evenly distributed unless you have worked genuinely hard at it. This is why the classic failure of home edibles is not a batch that is too strong, it is a batch where one brownie in the tray is four times the others.
Averages do not help you here. Nobody eats the average brownie.
A tray is a batch recipe nobody portions
Even with perfect mixing, a tray is a batch, and batches need the arithmetic we spell out for Session Punch: total dose divided by a fixed number of equal portions, stated out loud. In practice people cut a tray by eye, then someone takes a corner piece and someone else takes two.
The label problem
A homemade edible has no packaging. If something goes wrong, whether that is an adult who took too much or a child who found it, the single most useful piece of information is the dose, and it exists only in the head of whoever made it. Write it down and tape it to the container. Every time.
That is not a hypothetical concern. Paediatric edible exposures rose sharply between 2017 and 2021 and nine in ten happened at home, which we go through in Keeping it out of reach.
So what is left?
Quite a lot, actually. Every one of the problems above comes from heat and from batter. Remove those two and the arithmetic survives:
- Fold a known dose into something cold and already finished.
- Dose per plate, not per batch.
- Use a product whose milligrams are printed on it.
That is the no-cook method, and it is the only approach on this site we are willing to write recipes around.