You should always put forth the effort to properly prepare your marijuana before cooking it — this will ensure that your doses are even and consistent and that you don’t waste any money or marijuana. The cornerstone of preparation is being organized, and by putting in a little work now you can save a lot of wasted time spent fixing mistakes later. To help, we’ve created this list of rules to follow.

• Rule #1: Always, always, ALWAYS grind your bud. This is true whether you are smoking, vaporizing, or eating — the more surface area the plant matter has the more efficient the chemistry is going to be. For example, when you are making cannabutter, the THC is activated/released from the plant material to be absorbed by the fat in the butter. By grinding your weed as finely as possible you are increasing the amount of surface area where the two components (marijuana and butter) are touching, and this facilitates a faster chemical exchange. Likewise for vaporizing: more surface area means more places where the THC vapor can escape the plant matter and being their airborne journey into your lungs. We highly, highly recommend Kannastor grinders, though there are a number of places where you can buy quality hand grinders for cheap.
• Rule #2: Take your time to separate all the different parts of the plant. Some recipes call for cannabutter, some recipes call for hemp seeds, some recipes call for leaf trim… you get the idea. No one wants to bite into a soft brownie and get poked with a stem. Also, different parts of the plant lose moisture at different rates. This means that two different things (say, a delicious cake and a seed that made its way into the batter) baked at a medium temperature over a period of time could result in one item cooking before the other (i.e. the errant seed might eventually get hot enough to burn and turn bitter, potentially ruining the sweet cake recipe it snuck its way into). We’ve found that proper separation helps alleviate problems like this; in fact, you should invest in containers to split up all your bits and pieces. Many cannachefs keep a bud jar, a stem jar, a seed jar, a keif jar, etc. Investing in a good pair of scissors or shears can really save you time and sore hands as well if you are preparing a large amount of marijuana. Gerber makes a great pair of game shears that are great for cutting plant material as well. Pro tip: Make sure that you clean your scissors and other tools with rubbing alcohol after every use to keep them working like new and free of sticky resin.
• Rule #3: Don’t bother with male plants. We keep reading “testimonials” from people swearing that they got super high while smoking male leaves. Yes, male plants do have THC in them and yes, you can extract what littler might be there when making cannabutter or marijuana tinctures. The only problem is that you’ll also be getting way more plant material (like chlorophyll) than “active ingredients”. If you really don’t care about having a weaker, less tasty, or otherwise inferior final product… by all means go ahead and use the male plants! It’s of our opinion, however, that male plants should be killed as soon as they become suspect (unless you are trying to make seeds on purpose, of course) and the nutes and light be better spent on the ladies. If you really hate to see things go to waste, make cannabutter with the male plant matter. As long as you keep the butter above its melting point and don’t let it solidify, you can keep cooking fresh marijuana into the same butter over and over until the butter has reached its saturation limit. This allows lower-quality cannabis like mids or schwag (or male marijuana plants) to be used most effectively.

Use the Rubik’s Cube simulator if you don’t have a real puzzle to play with. Set a random scramble and try to figure out the solution!