Marijuana Brownies: The Best Way To Make Them

For its batch of oil, this was the correct size brownie for maximum enjoyability.

Few drugs are as rewarding as cannabis cooked up in brownies. You’ve got the rich brownie itself as a fitting sendoff, then a half-hour to an hour-and-a-half later, the thing descends on you like a ton of feathers, pouncing rather than creeping. The time discrepancy is the result of whether your stomach is empty or full when you eat the thing, and the rate of your metabolism, too. Either way, the effect is far more visceral than smoking weed, you feel it in your body even more than in your cranium. And as the brownie descends your alimentary tract, it has a slightly differing impact at every stage. The effects last longer, and you can expect to be intoxicated for four hours or more.

My method results in cheap brownies, but it’s a giant mess.

There are a lot of myths going around about how to make brownies. As a trained chemist, I believe I’ve come up with the best method. I’ve written it down in narrative form for the special recipe I use, but there’s a quicker version at the end of this post that may be more in keeping with your inclinations and your supply of combustible intoxicants, as I call them.

The saint of the cannabis brownie is Alice B. Toklas, Getrude Stein’s main squeeze. Her method actually involved macerating the pot with dried fruits and eating it raw. While this may have been effective, cooking the weed is more so. And her method must have resulted in horrible gas.

I’ve heard gastro-hippies go on and on about how you’ve got to take butter and poach the pot in it for many hours or even days at low temperature. This is total bullshit. In my experience, all the active THC is extracted from the plant in 15 minutes or so. I’ve heard others go to great lengths to buy French chocolate and make the brownies from scratch. This is also bullshit. What people really want is a boxed brownie mix, a familiar flavor modified in a positive way by the exotic taste of the oil.

Years ago, like you, I used expensive bud to make brownies. This is a mistake, but often an unavoidable one. A friend from Pratt had a boyfriend who was a grower in eastern Pennsylvania. She convinced him to give us the unsalable outer leaves of his plants at a steep discount. The discount was also because the leaves had already been used to make “bubble hash,” a locally produced soft hash that’s made by washing the marijuana in an actual washing machine to mechanically remove the THC crystals (THC doesn’t dissolve in water). The rinse water is saved and evaporated and Voila! – bubble hash.

For the boiling step, a wok was hilariously pressed into service.

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The finished product, waiting to be cut up into the appropriate size pieces

For $100 on that first occasion, we got about 15 pounds of the outer leaves post-washing machine, packed in two plastic garbage bags. It was still sopping – about half of the weight was water, we estimated. But that much pot was far more than we needed.

As a first triage step, we simply grabbed big wads of weed and wrung it out, discarding the brown water. Remember that the THC we wanted was actually in the leaves. We then took about a pound of wrung leaves and put them in three big pans along with 64 ounces of the cheapest corn oil product we could find.

You’ll need spatter screens for the next step, because there’s still plenty of moisture in the leaves. Put the plants in at room temp, pour in the oil, and gradually bring the pot to a boil. Let it bubble for 30 minutes, which is when most of the water will be evaporated. Boil longer if need be to evacuate the water, but at this point maximum THC will be extracted. Further heating will not denature it, in my experience.

Merge the oil from the three pots, filtering it through coffee filters into a big jar or jars. At this point it is ready to use.

Buy a box of brownies (I prefer Betty Crocker) and make them in a 9 X 14 pan using the oil. Use the maximum number of eggs specified in the recipe on the box. Cut the pan into 24 brownies of equal volume.

Betty Crocker is The Man!

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Cut the brownies to the desired size and store them in the freezer in an air-tight container. Gosh they taste good frozen!

Now here is the most important step. You are the guinea pig. Eat as much of one brownie as you dare, and wait two hours. This should give you a good idea of how strong the baked goods are. You are now prepared to specify the dosage: one-half brownie, one brownie, one-and-one half brownies, and two brownies being the most common dosages.

You now know just how potent your THC oil is, and can behave accordingly, making perfect dosage brownies every time.

You can use the same method with any other form of marijuana, and with retail bud, too. If the latter, I’d begin with a quarter ounce, and boil it in 24 ounces of oil for 10 minutes. Make a batch of brownies, which usually require around 6 ounces of oil. You can then make five futher batches with the same potency. I’m betting, if you have good pot, you’ll find that a half brownie is plenty.