Stealthy, potent, low labor medicated coconut oil method

I've spent the last few years experimenting with the various methods of extracting active ingredients from herb in order to make edibles. I've used stove top, improvised double boiler, oven and crock pot methods, with and without water, using coconut oil, butter, olive oil, canola oil, and even bacon fat, all with varying degrees of success. Thanks to the generous guidance of several experienced and knowledgeable posters here (especially Bad Kitty Smiles and Psychedelic Sam) I've come up with a method that is perfect for my needs and works the same way every time.

However, my living situation does not permit me to take over the kitchen for extended periods of time, and stealth is a big issue. I live in a house with kids, and non-weed-friendly guests and family members frequently coming and going, etc., so I don't often have big blocks of time available to devote to making medicated oil. I also don't have large quantities of raw material to work with. Plus I'm also kind of lazy, and don't want to work too hard at this. So I've adapted and adjusted some of the best methods I've found to my own situation, and after some trial and error, I've settled on a method that really suits my requirements. I want to share it with folks who may be in similar circumstances, and may not have the time or inclination to go through the hundreds of pages of posts on this subject looking for info that may (or may not) be useful or relevant to them.

Before we start though, the one thing I've found to be uniformly true across all the various methods I've experimented with: a good extraction takes time. There is no good substitute for time. You can get some results with quicky methods like firecrackers and teas, but if you're in a hurry and have limited quantities of raw materials, you're better off smoking or vaping, because the quicky methods simply are not very efficient at extracting active ingredients. My method does take a little time, but it's efficient, effective, low-labor, and stealthy – no smell, and no need to take over the kitchen.

Here's what you need:

• Two and a half days worth of patience. Mandatory!
• Herb – I use about 10 grams (I don't have a scale, so I eyeball it – do a Google search for an image of “one gram of cannabis” for a general idea of how much that is), which for me makes about 40 powerful doses, but the amount can be adjusted as long as you keep the ratio of herb to oil the same.
• Coconut oil – a 16 ounce jar is about $3, and can be found at most supermarkets.
• Soy lecithin granules. This is optional, but it DOES make a difference. I got a large container (basically a lifetime supply, since very little is needed per batch) from Whole Foods for somewhere around $10.
• A grinder. I use a coffee grinder, but anything that gets the raw material ground to about the consistency of coarsely ground black pepper will do. (I suppose you could even use one of those kitchen pepper mills, but clean it first, unless you want your edibles to have a south-of-the-border kick.)
• A crock pot.
• An empty glass jar with a top. My preferred jar is a 16 salsa jar from Trader Joe's, because it's short and somewhat wide. It needs to fit in the crock pot with the crock pot lid on.
• An oven-safe dish and some aluminum foil to cover it tightly. This is for decarbing, which makes a difference and is really worth the little bit of extra time it takes to do.
• A kitchen strainer – one of those little hand-held things that looks sort of like an ice cream scooper, with a half circle of wire mesh and a handle.
• Some cheese cloth – available at any supermarket in the baking aisle. A package is around $2, and will be enough for quite a few batches.

Once you have gathered all of the above, you'll be set for a lots of batches. You won't have to go shopping again for anything else (except herb and coconut oil.)

Let's get started.

• Grind herbs until they're around the consistency of coarsely ground black pepper. Lots of crystals will separate from the leafy material. Be sure to clean your grinder of all of these and add them back in with the ground herb.

• Decarb. Spread the ground herbs thinly in the baking dish, seal dish with aluminum foil, and bake at 220F for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, take the dish out and let it cool. This is the only point where any ambient smell is generated, but if the baking dish is sealed and allowed to cool before uncovering it, it's basically imperceptible, since nothing is burned at these temps.

• While decarbing, take 8 oz. of coconut oil (half of the 16 oz. jar) and put it into the empty salsa jar. Place this on top of the oven. Coconut oil is a solid below 76F, and a liquid above 76F. The warmth of the oven will melt it to its liquid state, which is what we want.

• Once the herb is decarbed and the baking dish has cooled, add the decarbed herb to the liquid coconut oil, put the lid tightly on the jar, and shake it up.

(As a quick side note, I mentioned the stealthy aspect of this method. The above process is the only part where you'll need to use your kitchen. Figure on around 45 minutes. After this, we use the crock pot. I put the crock pot on my basement workbench, where no one in my house ever goes, but this could be done anywhere – a closet, a bedroom, the garage, wherever it works for you. The crock pot doesn't get hot enough to burn anything, and because the oil jar is sealed, there's no smell.)

• Fill your crock with water up to the point where the salsa jar is almost but not quite covered – you don't want the jar completely covered with water, but it needs to be surrounded by water to a point above the level of the oil in the jar. Turn the crock pot on high, put in the jar of oil and herb, and put the cover on the crock pot.

• Now go about your life for the next 24 hours. If you think about it and are able, come back and remove the jar from the water (it'll be hot, so use a rag or something to grip it) and shake vigorously once in a while. No big deal though if you can't.

• After 24 hours (or so), remove the jar from the crock pot, and let it cool a bit. (You may notice white mineral deposits from the water bonding to the outside of the jar as it dries – no worries, it's normal.)

• Once it's cooled enough to touch, remove the lid from the jar of oil and herb, add a tablespoon of soy lecithin granules, seal it again, and shake vigorously. The granules won't dissolve immediately - don't worry about it.

• Some of the water will have evaporated from the crock pot during the previous 24 hours. Refill it with water up to the original level, make sure it's still set to “high”, put the sealed jar back in there, and put the lid back on the crock pot.

• Come back every few hours to shake the oil.

• Leave it in the crock pot for at least 12 hours. 18 hours won't hurt. 24 hours max. I split the difference and go with 18 hours.

• After 18-ish hours, turn off the crock pot, remove the jar of oil, leave the lid on and let it cool to room temperature by itself until the oil becomes solid again. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SPEED THE COOLING PROCESS! If you submerge the glass jar in cold water, put it in the refrigerator, outside in cold weather, etc., the sudden temperature change can shatter the glass, and everything will be lost. IMPORTANT - LET THE JAR COOL TO ROOM TEMP AND LET THE OIL SOLIDIFY ON ITS OWN! Depending on how much oil is in the jar, this may take a couple of hours, so blaze up and go watch "Fight Club".

• Once the oil has cooled to room temperature and completely solidified, put the jar in the freezer overnight, or at least for a few hours. 6 hours, 8 hours, whatever. At the very least, go blaze up and watch "Fight Club" again.

• Remove the jar from the freezer, and let it naturally warm back to room temp. AGAIN, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SPEED THIS PROCESS! For the same reasons mentioned above, attempting to 'help' the process along can prove disastrous.

• Once the jar of oil is room temp, the oil will probably still be in its solid state. Take a large bowl, fill it with hot tap water, and put the sealed jar in the bowl to warm up and liquefy the oil again. DON'T use a microwave to melt the oil. Again, patience, grasshopper. Add more hot tap water as needed until the oil is completely melted.

• Once all the oil is liquefied, it's time to filter out the plant material. Place your wire mesh kitchen strainer over whatever container you'll be using to store your oil (I use a square-shaped shallow plastic Tupperware-type container, which I'll store behind the old box of baking soda in the fridge where no one will notice it, and anyone who does notice it will be afraid to look into it.) Cut a section of cheesecloth that is big enough to fold over a couple of times to create a few layers to strain the oil through, and fit it into the wire mesh 'cup' of the strainer, while leaving enough cheesecloth hanging around the outside the edges of the strainer so there's something to gather up at the top and twist when it comes time to squeeze the last few precious drops of our labors.

• Pour the liquefied oil through the cheesecloth and strainer into your container. Press the ‘mash' down gently with the back of a spoon to squeeze out as much oil as you can. Then gather up the edges of the cheesecloth at the top around the ‘mash' to make a ball, and twist it tightly like a tourniquet to squeeze out the last drops of the oil. Once every last drop has been squeezed out and the 'mash' is dry-ish and crumbly looking, toss it. You're done.

Put your container of oil in the fridge; it will solidify to look like olive-colored butter, and can be stored in the fridge for months. You can even freeze it until use - some folks say this will help a bit more with potency. I haven't noticed that, but at any rate it doesn't hurt it.

Now, what to do with it? I always eat a test dose to check the potency first (making sure I don't have anything else to do for a while, just in case ), so I'll know how much to use when I cook with it. At this point I have a pretty good idea of my ideal dosing, thanks to lots of fun trial and error with previous extractions. I know that approximately 10 grams when smoked will be about 40 doses for me (YMMV), so once it is solidified again I use a knife to draw a grid of 40 equal-sized squares into the top of the solidified oil. (This is why I used a square-shaped container – I've used a round margarine container in the past but it's more difficult to mark it into equal sized doses that way.) I just carve out one of the 40 squares from the solid oil, and eat it on a pita chip. It doesn't taste bad (again, YMMV), and the dose is perfect for my needs. But of course I don't want to eat it that way all the time, so I use the oil in cooking something tasty, portable, and convenient.

So first figure out your own best dose, then just use the right amount of oil for your ideal dosage(s) in place of that same amount of butter or oil in any recipe that calls for it.

I'm not that big a fan of chocolate, so I don't make brownies. My preferred edible is cornbread biscuits. They're super easy, cheap, tasty, effective, and keep for a very long time. Buy a 99 cent package of Jiffy brand cornbread mix at any supermarket. The mix calls for one egg and 1/3 of a cup of milk. All I do is replace the 1/3 cup of milk with 1/3 of a cup of my medicated oil. Eliminating the milk also eliminates most of the moisture from the final product, which means they'll keep for a much longer time without going bad. And replacing it with the oil means that instead of a soft ‘bread', they turn out as crispy, light, tasty and potent cornbread ‘cookies'. It may sound weird, but friends who've had them tell me that they'd eat them even without the medicated oil – they really are good. I make them in a muffin pan that is meant to make 12 muffins, splitting the batter evenly between all 12 muffins sections, which means each is only about a spoon and a half of batter, filling each muffin section only about 1/4 of the way up with the batter. Other than that, cook as directed on the package and you're in business. One half of one of these, and I'm ready to go watch "Fight Club" again. A whole one, and I become one with the movie.

I hope this helps some folks who may interested in edibles but are having a difficult time sorting through all the good and bad info online about making them. The bottom line is that they DO take some time to do right, but they're not really difficult or labor intensive to make if you have a little patience and follow the directions. The process gets easier each time you do it, and if you do it right, they are definitely worth the effort. Enjoy!

 

^{Up, and also...}
 
^{I mentioned in the post above that I'd used bacon fat for extraction once.  I don't see any other posts referring to this, so I wanted to elaborate just a little bit here.}
 
^{When I cook bacon, I always do it in the microwave.  Put a paper towel or two on a plate, a few strips of bacon on that, and a paper towel on top.  3 minutes in the microwave, and boom, perfect bacon, with most of the fat drained away from it.  And the fat that is cooked off is filtered through the paper towels and is perfectly clear and clean of all debris in the bottom of the plate under the paper towel. So I started collecting this purified bacon fat until I had enough for a small herbal extraction. Once I had about half a cup, I used a few grams of herb and a stovetop improvised double boiler extraction method (a small covered pot inside a large pot of water.)  It turns out bacon fat is a good extraction medium, I would assume because it's a pure fat.  It does a very good job of absorbing what needs to be absorbed from the herb.  BUT...two important points to keep in mind: 1., I'm not sure it would work well with brownies or your typical baked sweet treats, because it does retain a little of the bacon-y goodness in the flavor.  (I melted it into some soup.  MMmmm.) And 2., it may be just me, but it took a LONG time to metabolize and get an effect.  The effect was powerful, but it literally took like 4 hours before it started coming on.  My conclusion - bacon fat seems to be metabolized very slowly (by me anyway - YMMV), so this method of extraction would be best if you wanted a delayed reaction.  For instance, if I was going on a long plane trip and wanted to consume something before I left for the airport that I wanted to kick in after we're in the air.}

 

Yes. As a general rule, the longer you extract, the more you extract. I'm not sure exactly when you hit the point of diminishing returns, I.e., degrading potency, but as long as temps are controlled it's not going to be within the first 24 hours.

I'd recommend extending the second heating though, after the freeze. The way I understand it, the point of freezing is to force more breakdown of active ingredients into the oil by subjecting them to opposite temperature extremes. If the freezing causes cellular matter to break up more, then more heat afterwards should help with absorbing more of the good stuff into the oil.

 

Thanks for checking in, member of the BKS team!  I'm flattered that my little method has come to your attention.  Of course I defer to Kat's knowledge and experience, and welcome any and all comments, suggestions, etc.
 
A few comments though:
 
I honestly haven't noticed any particularly narcotic effects with this extraction vs. smoking or vaping the same herbs.  I regularly have one of the resulting edibles before a night out, and they're definitely not 'knock out drops'.  And I having nothing at all against THC - that's why I'm here!  Much of the time, I actually prefer more 'up' / THC effects, and this oil seems to provide me a good balance of head / body effects.  Possibly an explanation for this is related to an assumption in your note about the temp of the crock pot.  You suggest that the jar should be suspending in the water to prevent movement of the jar; this assumes that the crock pot is hot enough to create a boiling motion in the water that would cause the jar to move.  Maybe it's just my crock pot, but even on 'high', the water in the crockpot never boils or gets hot enough to cause the jar to move.  I haven't checked the actual temp of the water (although I will next time!), but the jar never moves - not even a little.  There also isn't much evaporation of the water in the crock pot.  Over 24 hours in the covered crock pot, less than an inch of water is steamed away.  So maybe my crock pot isn't running as hot as others do, which may have some effect on my (good) results.  I'm actually curious how crock pot water at 160 to 180F would cause the jar to move - it's below boiling, so there's no movement of the water, right?  I mean, it's just a bowl of hot water, and unless there's some physical phenomenon that occurs that I don't know about, the water shouldn't move unless it's boiling or close to it.
 
I will say this: I've done this same method but with only 6 to 8 hours in the same crock pot, and the results were less potent.  I ultimately settled on 24 hours out of convenience - I can start one night after everyone has gone to bed, and return to it the next night after everyone has gone to bed.  And remember one of my primary requirements is stealth, followed closely by minimal human intervention.  I may be giving up a little something in return, but I am experiencing consistent success so I'm pretty happy with the balance at this point. 

I'm also curious about your references to crock pots heating oil differently than they heat water, as far a temp control in concerned.  Am I missing something?  The crock pot in my method isn't filled with oil, which is what your quote above seems to be suggesting.  It's filled with water, with a sealed jar of oil in the water.  So essentially it's the water that is heating the oil, not the crockpot.  I think of it as a sort of low-temp double boiler that doesn't actually boil.  What I'm saying is that I don't see how that point applies to my situation.  And while a crock pot may not be the recommended tool, it's the only tool at my disposal for providing heat in a stealthy and unsupervised way.

Also, I'm not using canning jars, so that doesn't really apply either.
 
I wish I was able to use a full kitchen and all the available technology and tools used in the best possible scenarios.  But as I said at the top of my original note, that's not an option for me, nor I imagine is it for many others who are interested in edibles.  Stealth and ease are crucial for me - without them, I wouldn't be able to make edibles at all.  The method I described is the best I've been able to come up with so far with the limitations I have.  No doubt I'll continue to tweak and improve it - for one, at your recommendation I'm going to try a shorter initial heating time the next time out.  If you or anyone at BKS Industries has any more suggestions that will help improve my results without compromising the stealthiness and low-labor aspects of my method, I'm all ears!
 
Thanks!
 
 
PS - will you ask Kat if she'll marry me?   

 

 

One more point on my method above: As I mentioned above, I've been getting approximately four doses per gram of dry herb, or one dose per .25g of raw material.  That appears to be considerably better than many of the examples I've seen people writing about on GC.  I often see people referring to using a gram or more of raw material per dose of edibles.  IMO, if someone is using that much herb to get a dose of their butter / oil, there's something wrong with their extraction method.  And BTW, I'm not using designer brand herb, just average grade home grown.  
 
If anyone takes the plunge and uses the method I describe in the post above, I'd be very interested in hearing about your results!

 

Yes, it sounds like your crock pot may be cooking at a higher temp than mine. If your jar is moving, yes, set the crock pot to low and see if the jar settles down. If that doesn't help, then I'd recommend putting a small washcloth or some folded up paper towels under the jar to keep it from bouncing against the bottom of the crock pot.

 

BTW, since it seems your crock pot is hotter than mine (hot enough to get the jar moving, which isn't the case with mine), I'd also suggest following the knowledgeable advice from Bad Kat Labs above, and shorten your cooking time. 6 to 8 hours may be enough at hotter temps.

 

So RAS, any update?