Cooking with Cannabis Classes
Kitchen Toke Magazine April 4, 2019
Travelers and residents of the nation’s weed-friendly cities can still find in-person chefs willing to teach them how to infuse a home-cooked meal.
Chef Jarod Farina began experimenting with edibles when he was in high school. Farina teaches cannabis cooking classes in Oakland, California, and Denver for Colorado Cannabis Tours, a company that offers various cannabis-related activities, including pot-friendly art classes.
Farina says his students range in age, but most are tourists visiting the Denver area. The cooking class is a hands-on three-hour course that covers 10 different dishes and the edibles basics: decarboxylation and dosing. He says a lot of untrained at-home cooks screw up their meals by skipping decarboxylation, which involves heating cannabis at a low temperature over a period of time to activate the THC in the plant. Without that crucial step, Farina says, you’re missing out on the full effect of the weed.
Next, he gives his students a crash course in dosing, teaching them how to calculate the amount of THC in a serving based on the percentage of THC in their cannabis. But because not everybody knows how much THC is in their cannabis, especially if it’s homegrown pot or purchased on the black market, he offers an “old school” method, a trial-and-error approach. If in doubt about the THC percentage, Farina instructs his students to make a batch of cannabis-infused butter or oil at home, eat a teaspoon of it, and wait an hour and see how they feel.