Bernie Mac's Cannabutter Recipe

Good morning yall,

I love cooking, eating, and marijuana. So naturally I began cooking with my first love, Mary Jane. This thread is going to be dedicated specifically to my cannabutter recipe, which has been fine-tuned tremendously. I was able to refine my recipe by baking my chocolate chip cookies commercially and there by having to make many, many batches of cannabutter. I have spent many hours researching and experimenting with different things, so don't be wary when taking my advice! Thanks and let me begin:
 

Bernie Mac's Cannabutter:​

Prep: 1-3 hours (depending on size of batch)
Cook: 3 hours (not including freezing time)
Total: 4+ hours

 

Supplies:​

-stove top and oven
-unsalted butter

-candy thermometer(optional but makes better butter)

-marijuana

-stove top pot(cooking setup shown)

-cheesecloth

-aluminum foil

-spoon to stir

-coffee grinder

-metal strainer

-appropriate sized tupperware

-tongs







 

Directions:​

1) Prepare yourself. This is going to take a long fucking time. Set aside atleast 5 hours if this is your first time. I like to break the cooking up into multiple days. Get comfortable, a fat nug, and make a big glass of Tang.








2)My general rule of thumb when deciding the ratio of butter to marijuana is NO MORE than 7 grams per stick of butter(4oz). Anymore than that and you won't have enough butter to properly leach the plant matter. So when I cook I use around 3.5-5.0 grams of marijuana per stick(4oz). This allows for plenty of butter when straining. Right down your numbers and keep good side notes:








3)Now lets get physical. Time to clarify the butter. Since clarifying removes about 25% of the butter, you need to compensate for that by adding in 25% of the original calculated amount of butter. For example: in the above notes I found I needed 9 sticks of butter for my recipe. I added roughly 2 sticks to compensate for clarifying. So I used 11 sticks of unsalted butter in total.
Anyway, Take all that unsalted butter you have measured out and put it in your pot. Turn your stove to a notch or two higher than low. Heating the butter slowly is key to making a good tasting product. Once the butter melts completely you will see white foam start rising to the top of the liquid. This is all the milkfat and solids that come in commercial butter. This should be skimmed off with a spoon or something and disposed of. I like to dispose it onto some popcorn. Tastes great. But the reason we do this is because all the extra milkfats and solids absorb some THC which would have been absorbed and activated by the fats in the butter, therefore lowering your product potency.
If you have any problem clarifying butter, there are plenty of tutorials online since it is very common in cooking. I even googled it for yall here.







4)We have all this flower, what do we do with it before putting in the butter? We grind and decarb the cannabis. Use the coffee grinder to powder the bud. More fine = more surface area. Surface area is fucking great. Take this powder and spread it out on some aluminum foil in a nice layer. Then fold that up in pouch. Here's an example I did with some trim:


Heat your oven to 250 degrees F. Place that pouch on the rack for around 24 minutes. I will decarb different bud anywhere from 22-28 minutes. You have to examine the cannabis to see if you need more time. 24 minutes is a good default time for novices.







5)Your butter is clarified and your nugs are decarbed. Time to combine and heat. Pour your powdery marijuana into the clarified butter and give it a good stir. At this point in the recipe, there are two paths you can take to heat the mix, easy or annoying. Annoying yeilds a better potency but not by much. I will explain both:
Annoying: Put the pot of butter/marijuana mix directly on the stove and turn heat to 2nd notch from low. Place candy thermometer in the mix and watch. The goal is to have the mix stay at 220 degrees F. This is a little tricky and needs tenderness when adjusting the heat. But if you have the patience and attention span to do it, I recommend it. Heres an example of this setup:

Easy: Put the pot of butter/marijuana mix into another pot of boiling water. Some may call this a double boiler. Since water boils at 212 degrees F, this is what the temperature the whole pot will be. One thing to watch is that the water level of the big pot does not get too low. Prevent this by adding small amounts of water as to not change the temperature too much. Here is an example of this setup:

Using one of the stated heating methods, cook the mix for 1.5 hours then freeze the mix completely through. Once frozen through take out and heat up. Cook for another 1.5 hours. Stir atleast every 10 minutes. After 3 hours of total cooking, remove from heat and let cool(not too much or it will solidify).
*Note* When I cook the butter, I heat the butter the annoying way to get it to 220 degrees F for the first half hour, then put into boiling water.
Once cooler, strain through cheesecloth into a square tupperware. The butter will be easier to divide into equal parts with a shallow square tupperware. Take note, the cheesecloth is double layered in the metal strainer with a friend holding it over the tupperware while you pour the marijuana mixture through:

*Note*stir the mix up right before you pour to get the plant matter off the bottom of the pot so you have less scraping to do at the end






6) Your butter should now look something like this:

Put this in the freezer. Once frozen solid, take out and divide into even chunks by cutting with a large knife warmed by hot sink water.



7) Once you have your divided chunks, you just treat it like regular butter! Simple as that. I had 9 sticks of butter so I cut my batch into 9 chunks roughly equal to a stick each chunk:

I like to make chocolate chip cookies. Cheap, tasty, and easy.





Some old batches:






Hope its not too complicated for yall and I didn't forget anything. Thanks for reading and feel free to ask questions. Use this knowledge as power to help others with medical ailments and having a good time.

Listen to the river sing sweet songs
-Bernie

 

thanks badkitty for the tips! the recipe can only get better!

So about the decarb stuff. I wrap the plant in tinfoil pretty well, whenever i decarb the bud never comes out burnt in anyway. i think my oven seems to be pretty consistent or the tinfoil does a good job of maintaining temp. this is where I got my times and temps. no doubt you have seen this chart:


The butter ratio point you had is very interesting. I guess when I started figuring out ratios I never really researched the actually amount of glandular material that can be absorbed into the fats. But your point is correct, more than 7 grams per stick is a lot of plant matter for a little butter.What do you think about my ratio of butter to plant? How do you think I should adjust it to get the most potency? I changed step number 2 to be correct. Hows it sound?

Ice cube trays? Genius! So smart for exact rations. thanks

also, I have definetly used some info from GC written by you in other threads and that cannapharm recipe definitely influence my recipe alot. Sorry for not citing you, im just lazy. here is your thread with info ive saved:

badkittysmiles thread, clarified butter info

cannapharm recipe


About the solvent used, clarified butter, does coconut oil absorb THC more efficiently than clarified butter? I know it is much more potent and smaller amounts are needed but say you have 7 grams of bud, which would get more THC out of those 7 grams? Clarified butter or coconut oil?

Anyway, expect me to ask more questions because I never have access to a person with lots cooking experience, just the internet's cooking experience.

-bernie

 

veryy interesting. i might take a wack at it