As CBD oil continues to grow in popularity, something you probably hear more and more about is cooking with CBD oil.
It is rapidly becoming a popular way to eat more healthily and can also be an excellent answer to the question of how to make CBD oil taste better.
But there are a lot of questions around this, for example:
- Can you cook with CBD oil?
- Do you need pure CBD oil for cooking or something slightly different like hempseed oil?
- Are there any tips for cooking with CBD oil you should follow?
- What are the best CBD oil recipes?
There are plenty of people out there who are interested in learning more about the benefits of CBD oil but would rather find a way to blend it into healthy eating via methods such as CBD infused cooking oil, as opposed to simply taking drops or capsules.
After all, CBD has been suggested to hold benefits for encouraging better general wellbeing – so adding it to our food can be a healthy and fun way to cook, while also helping us to regulate our bodies.
In this guide:
Can you cook with CBD oil?
The short answer is yes – although there are multiple ways to go about it.
Firstly, CBD isn’t a frying oil.
Excessive heat can cause CBD to lose potency, so pouring it directly into the pan on a high heat, then adding food later isn’t a great idea.
If you do want to use it as a cooking oil, it’s usually better to fry your food with hempseed oil first (an oil formulated for cooking that contains traces of CBD) and then add some pure CBD oil a bit later.
Read more: Hemp oil vs CBD oil
However, the best way to cook with CBD is to bind it with a fat.
Cannabinoids bind well with fat or oil-based ingredients, so one of the best ways to begin cooking with CBD oil is to first make CBD butter, CBD coconut oil, or similar.
This makes the ingredient a lot more versatile, as you can easily try baking with CBD oil by using CBD butter, or add CBD to healthy vegan meals via CBD coconut oil.
Read more: How to make CBD butter
What’s the best CBD oil for cooking?
The most important thing when choosing a CBD oil for cooking is that it’s broad spectrum and organic.
Broad Spectrum means that CBD makes use of all of the beneficial ingredients of the hemp plant, including CBD along with terpenes, flavonoids, other cannabinoids, vitamins, healthy fats and more.
Read more: What are terpenes?
As for organic, that should be self-explanatory – organic plants are grown without pesticides, and you don’t want those nasty chemicals in your CBD oil, or indeed in your food.
As long as you find an oil that’s both broad-spectrum and organic, the rest is simply about finding an ethical brand that you are able to trust.
Now that you’ve chosen a CBD oil, the next step is binding it with a fatty or oily food product so that it can be more easily added to food.
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How can you use CBD oil for cooking?
Heating or decarboxylation
The first thing to know is that, despite the fact that overheating CBD can cause it to evaporate and therefore reduce its effectiveness, mildly heating it can increase its effectiveness.
Both THC and CBD actually start out as THC-acid and CBD-acid in the hemp plant, and need to undergo a process caused by heat known as decarboxylation in order to become the active ingredients THC and CBD.
For those who smoke or vape CBD or THC, this is a non-issue, as it is heated up during use, but for those ingesting it, decarboxylation is necessary for either compound to work.
Luckily, all good quality CBD brands should do this for you, meaning CBD oils should already be decarboxylated and you shouldn’t have to worry about it.
Unfortunately, not all brands do this, and even in CBD oils that have undergone decarboxylation, there is a chance some cannabinoids will remain in acid form.
Gently heating your CBD will cause decarboxylation and solve this issue.
This fact, combined with the fact that CBD binds well with fatty or oily substances, explains why creating CBD coconut oil or CBD butter is the best way to go about cooking with CBD oil.
5 tips for cooking with CBD oil
1. Temperature matters
We’ve already explained how exposing CBD to temperatures above 180°C/356°F – this is your final reminder!
Any CBD product cooked higher than this will not work.
2. Start small and work up to your perfect dose
There is a huge amount of variety in the size and weight of people, our endocannabinoid systems, the quality of CBD oils, and the amount of CBD they actually contain per drop.
This means there is no one-size-fits-all dose, and you should start small and work your way up to find your own ideal amount.
3. Store your CBD oil well
Since CBD is so sensitive to temperature and light, keep it somewhere cool, dry and dark.
Read more: How to store CBD oil
4. Stir thoroughly
Failing to stir your CBD into a mixture or batter correctly will end up in uneven doses or some parts of the end result not containing any CBD.
5. Adding CBD after is technically possible
Generally, you really should cook CBD into your food, in order to ensure complete decarboxylation and the best possible taste – but stirring it in at the end is possible, in desperate situations – especially if the food is still warm enough.
How to make CBD coconut oil
It should be no surprise that cooking with CBD with coconut oil is one of the healthiest ways to go about making CBD edibles recipes.
Coconut oil itself is a powerful health food containing a variety of healthy fats such as lauric acid and medium-chain triglycerides.
Lauric acid is one of the rarest and most healthy fats in nature, and the amount of lauric acid present in coconut oil is beaten only by breast milk – a big reason behind coconut’s reputation as a superfood.
Read more: CBD oil while breastfeeding
The human body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, which has anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-protozoa properties.
Why does this matter for CBD?
Because coconut oil has over 80% saturated fat content, compared to 50% for butter and 20% for olive oil.
Coconut oil also burns easily, meaning any recipe that uses it will involve gentle cooking that should also preserve the CBD content.
In other words, coconut oil is the perfect carrier oil for edible CBD.
Here’s how to combine them to make CBD coconut oil:
CBD coconut oil recipe
Here’s what you’ll need to make a small amount of CBD coconut oil for a single use:
Ingredients
- 1 cup coconut oil
- 10ml of broad spectrum organic CBD oil
Method
- Let the coconut oil simmer in a pot on the lowest heat setting.
- Add the CBD oil to the pot once the coconut oil is warmed up.
- Stir the CBD oil into the coconut oil and continue to simmer on low, never exceeding 180°C/356°F as this will burn the CBD.
- Turn off the hob, allow the mixture to cool down, and store at room temperature in a food container or glass jar.
Yes… it really is that easy!
You don’t even necessarily have to use it to cook with – you can simply stir our CBD coconut oil into a hot chocolate or make CBD tea or CBD coffee to add a tasty hint of coconut along with a dose of CBD.
If you would prefer to make CBD coconut oil in bulk in order to store and use over the long-term, you can follow the same steps above but use 10 cups of coconut oil and 100ml CBD oil.
If you live in a country or state where CBD flower is legal, an ounce of it combined with 450g of coconut oil can work too – simply grind the flower up finely and mix it into the coconut oil while heating gently along the lines of the above recipe.
Cooking with CBD olive oil
Personally, cooking with CBD oil using olive oil is my least favourite of the methods listed here.
With less saturated fat than both butter and coconut oil, olive oil is a subpar, although still popular substitute.
Since it contains only 20% saturated fat compared to 80% for coconut oil, the CBD won’t bind to it quite as well, and as such you may find it a good idea to use slightly more CBD.
We will do so in the below recipe, but this depends on your own ideal CBD dosage, so you can play with it to get the ideal balance.
Read more: CBD dosage guide
CBD olive oil recipe
Ingredients
- 1 cup olive oil
- 20ml of full spectrum CBD oil
Method
- Let the olive oil simmer gently in a saucepan on the lowest heat setting.
- Add the CBD oil to the pot once the olive oil has warmed slightly.
- Stir the CBD oil into the olive oil and continue to simmer on low, never exceeding 118°C/245°F to avoid burning either ingredient.
- Turn off the hob, allow the mixture to cool down, and store at room temperature in a Tupperware box or glass jar.
Once again, you can simply multiply these measurements to make however much CBD olive oil you like.
Now that you know how to make a good CBD cooking oil, you’ve opened yourself up to an entire new world of CBD cooking!
Cooking with CBD oil: Recipes
Now that you understand the science behind cooking CBD and have learnt how to create the perfect carrier oil for CBD and hemp oil recipes, it’s time to look at some of the best CBD recipes you can make:
CBD cookies recipe
These CBD cookies are a tasty and convenient way to get all of the benefits of CBD oil.
In our opinion, this is the tastiest way of cooking with CBD oil.
They are an excellent option for those who find CBD helps improve their health but who don’t like the taste of CBD drops.
In this recipe we recommend using CBD butter, but the coconut oil can also be a great option if you want coconut flavoured cookies, or to make vegan CBD cookies simply by switching out the chocolate chips and eggs for vegan substitutes too:
Ingredients
- 3 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- Half teaspoon salt
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 cup of CBD butter as prepared above
- 2 cups baking chocolate chips (this can be switched out for dried fruit, peanuts or any other filling you like)
- 2 teaspoon hot water
- 2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 eggs
Method
- First, preheat your oven to 170°C/340°F – CBD stops being effective at 180°C!
- Add your CBD butter, brown sugar and white sugar to a mixing bowl and mix until smooth.
- Beat in the eggs one by one.
- Stir in the vanilla extract.
- Dissolve the baking soda in the hot water, then add it to the mixture.
- Add the salt.
- Slowly stir in the chocolate chips or other fillings along with the flour.
- Dollop hearty spoonfuls of the mixture onto an ungreased baking tray.
- Bake for 10 mins or until lightly browned at the edges.
Final words on cooking with CBD oil
Heating CBD oil during cooking can be a great way to increase the beneficial properties of your CBD.
Using these tips, we encourage you to play around and create your own delicious recipes. You can also try your hand at baking our CBD brownies or making one of our delicious CBD superfood smoothies.
And of course, if you have a delicious recipe of you own, don’t be shy to share it with us at info@evopure.co.uk!
