Diff between making oil and cooking?

Rick's oil, is a kind of extract or concentrate... it can be used for vaping, smoking, topical-use, or eating. But it must be made in a certain way, for each method of use. Of course, smoking or vaping the end product, requires the least effort and the simple use of an evaporative solvent, such as alcohol, butane, naptha etc. No cooking oils should be used, when you intend on combusting or vaping the resulting 'oil'. You can preserve more terpenes by performing a cold extraction using alcohol, and allowing a slow evaporation at room temp.
When you plan to eat his oil, however, for the best effect it must still be broken down further and thinned in an absorbable/bioavailable, edible oil source.

Or alternately, to preserve much more in the way of terpenes (these provide analgesic, cancer fighting properties, sedation, and much more, to the experience) you can skip the pre-extraction, and move straight to infusing with edible oil.


You unfortunately can not simply cook ground cannabis flowers into food, unless you want minimal, inefficient results. It will 'work', but it's hugely inefficient because it wastes an enormous amount of potency, you need many multiple times the required material when you start cutting corners to that degree.
Cannabis glandular material is notoriously difficult to absorb on its own, even when it appears sticky, tacky and gooey. It still must be decarboxylated, or activated (removing the carboxyl group in the form of carbon dioxide and water vapor, causing cannabinoid conversion from their less active/inactive acids, to their more powerful delta forms) then broken down further to promote bioavailability, or cellular permeability, in order for the active material to be delivered to the blood stream.

Without the correct processing, much of your material (even if properly activated) will go 'in one end, and out the other'! This is why we have so much dosage discrepancy, and so many failed edible stories. Firecrackers, quickie oils, and worse, 'toss'n'bake' cakes and cookies, are 'worst-case-scenario' edibles, they require much more material, to achieve a lesser effect, versus a proper medical grade oil.
These recipes can require anything from twice as much, to five times the material, to achieve a lesser effect, and often variable results! While a good oil, will instead allow you to consume only a fraction of that, a bit less than you'd normally smoke, in order to achieve a much stronger, and longer-lasting effect. It can be the more-efficient means of intake versus smoking, but only with the correct processing.


Check out the stickied threads at the top of this section, for more advice, and for a range of recipes from the 'fast and sneaky', to the (still-stealthy!) patiently made, medical grade oils.


Hope this helps.