Pot sugar

Cannabis has earned itself a special place in the kitchen. Whether you prefer to add it to sweet classics like brownies or savoury delicacies like butter chicken, there are countless ways to infuse your favourite dishes with a healthy dose of bud.

Sugar, aka Blue Runtz, is a sweet-tasting soluble carbohydrate found in the sap of seed plants and the milk of mammals. It has had many uses over the years including being used as a spice, medicine and a sign of significant wealth. Sugar was historically reserved for the wealthiest families, often being plied into works of art and displayed at lavish celebrations.

Infusing sugar with cannabis is easy to do at home and even easier to use. Cannabis sugar is versatile it can be used in cocktails, warm beverages, baked goods or desserts. The recipe featured in this post uses a DIY Green Dragon Tincture. The tincture is a solution of alcohol and most of the cannabinoids, lipids and terpenes that was extracted from your bud.

Until now, one of the most common ways to use weed in the kitchen was to incorporate infused butter or oil. But now, cannabis chefs have come up with a new way to cook with weed; cannabis sugar.

Here’s how to make it.

What is cannabis sugar all about?

Try cannabis sugar (canna-sugar) for a gentle, calming high. For example, add your sativa blend sugar to your morning coffee. Need help getting to sleep? Try a soothing night-cap with an indica tincture. Canna-sugar is typically used as a condiment, as opposed to a base ingredient like cannabis butter. However, for a more potent high, swap out your regular sugar with weed infused sugar in any dessert recipe. Additionally, if the recipe already uses cannabis oil or cannabis butter, add a dose of canna- sugar to elevate further.

What pairs well with cannabis infused sugar?

Cannabis infused sugar is a novel way to add a dash of cannabis to your desserts, coffees, and cannabis teas. However, THC sugar has many more uses. Excitingly, you can flavor your weed sugar by adding different ingredients. Throw in a vanilla stick, orange zest, or even coffee beans to the final product. Also, we suggest adding culinary grade flowers like lavender and rosebuds. This creates an exquisite flavor with cannabis tea!

How else can I use canna-sugar?

Interestingly, cannasugar can be used to make an exciting scrub. Use your scrub to exfoliate for healthy looking skin and pores. Add your infused sugar to your favorite face mask recipe and soak up the benefits of THC. Try adding your weed infused sweetness to a homemade lip balm. This sugar will lightly flavor the lip balm while adding a hint of sweetness to the mix.

Cooking with weed: some basics

Before we show you how to make cannabis sugar, it’s important to cover some basics on cooking with cannabis.

One of the most important steps to cooking with weed is decarboxylation. It basically involves baking weed at a low heat for roughly 35-40 minutes. This helps convert some of the THCA (basically an acidic, non-psychoactive compound found in live cannabis plant material) to THC, the active psychoactive compound that gets you stoned. After all, that’s why you’re here, right?

The most important factor for proper decarboxylation is heat. The heat essentially breaks down precursor THCA to THC. Whenever decarboxylating cannabis, make sure to keep your oven temperature at 120°C/250°F max. Any higher and you risk degrading THC and losing potency.

Let’s Get Cooking!

Your new THC sugar must be stored in a cool, dark, sealed container for long periods of time. Be sure to get your storage containers ready and allot for an appropriate space.

See our video and recipe below to learn how to make a tincture and cannabis infused sweetness.

If you are interested in understanding how to make more cannabis infusions and recipes.

Ingredients

• 3 grams cannabis
• 120ml high-proof alcohol, such as Everclear
• 100g granulated sugar

Method

1. Roughly grind/chop your weed to a coarse consistency. Spread it out on a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake at 120°C/250°F for 35-40 minutes. Make sure your temperature never exceeds this limit.
2. Reduce the oven heat to 93°C/200°F. Transfer your decarboxylated weed to a jar and cover with alcohol. Screw the lid on the jar, making sure it is tight and secure.
3. Shake the jar every 5 minutes for 20 minutes total. Strain the liquid through some cheesecloth into a clean bowl. Discard the solid plant matter.
4. Mix sugar into the strained alcohol solution. Spread evenly into a glass baking dish. Bake at 93°C/200°F, stirring regularly until the alcohol has evaporated and the sugar has a golden colour.

Dosing

3.5gr of cannabis containing 25% THC will yield approximately 800mg of THC in your final product. This recipe will yield about 25-30 teaspoons of sugar, giving it an average THC content of approximately 20-25mg per tsp. Make sure you measure your batch to see exactly how much you have before performing the potency calculation.

Pro tips

• Remember, Ethanol vapors are extremely flammable and are heavier than air. Avoid sources of ignition. Using a gas oven is not recommended due to the potential for fire or explosion.
• A note on grinding: grinding your flower finely will produce a much greener looking and tasting sugar. To avoid this, simply break the buds apart with your fingers into pea sized pieces.
• Save the leftover buds! There’s still some cannabinoids present in them. Let them air dry and they can be used for infusing coconut oil, or simply grind them up and put into gelcaps for consumption.

Want an even cleaner look and taste?

Water Cure your flower first! After decarbing your flower in the oven, put it into a mason jar and fill with reverse-osmosis distilled water. Place the jar in the refrigerator. When the water begins to darken from the color leeching out of the buds, gently empty the colored liquid and replace with clean water; at least once a day.

Continue this process until color no longer leeches out of the buds. Depending on numerous factors, this process can take anywhere from 3-12 days. Once achieved, dry your cannabis using any quick dry method you prefer. Water curing removes all the water-soluble material from the plant leaving you some rather dull, lifeless looking buds. That’s OK though, its now even more potent by weight due to the loss of extraneous materials you didn’t want in your sugar.

Using water cured flower in your cannasugar recipe will produce a sugar that is still mostly white and without hardly any plant tastes at all.