Whether you use it on its own or infuse it into an oil, CBD-rich hemp flower is every cannabis chef’s best friend. Thanks to prominent influencers like The Herb Somm and the cannabis-themed event organizers behind Altered Plates, cooking with CBD is rapidly becoming a mainstream component of contemporary culinary culture.

You don’t need to have thousands of social media followers or be a world-renowned chef to make CBD work in your home kitchen, however. There are plenty of ways to cook with CBD that are as fun to try as they are rewarding to the palate, so let’s dive into everything you need to know to start cooking with Secret Nature CBD flower today.

What to do before you start cooking

Your CBD flower cooking experience will be much simpler if you take enough time to get ready first. Make sure you’re properly prepared to cook with CBD by following these simple steps:

Prepping your prep area

Before you start cooking with CBD flower, make sure that you’ve cleared an adequate amount of counter space, and collect all the tools you’ll need to make your CBD culinary plans into a reality. Ventilation is also a very important factor to keep in mind when you cook hemp. Even though it contains less than 0.3% THC, hemp flower smells exactly like marijuana when it’s cooked, so ensure that your kitchen exhaust fan is working properly and that people around you are aware of your plans.

Decarboxylating your buds

Some cooked dishes are hot enough to decarboxylate CBD flower during the preparation process, but decarbing your buds while cooking doesn’t give you very much control over this essential process. Decarboxylation transforms carboxylic acids present in Cannabis sativa flower, such as CBDa, into their final forms like CBD. Heat your buds to 240-250° F to decarboxylate them—we provide a detailed overview of how to complete this process in our article “3 Ways to Make CBD Oil Using CBD Flower.”

Finding the perfect recipe

Now that your buds are perfectly decarbed and you’ve prepared your cooking area, it’s time to search for an ideal CBD flower recipe. Cooked hemp buds are edible, and they pair well with a surprising number of dishes. Homemade CBD oil is even more versatile, and you can add it to practically any type of food.

Once you’ve found a recipe that suits your fancy, collect all of the ingredients other than CBD flower that you’ll need to put your dish together. If your recipe calls for CBD oil instead of CBD flower, follow one of the DIY CBD oil methods we outlined in “3 Ways to Make CBD Oil Using CBD Flower.” You can take a more creative approach by using one of your own recipes or coming up with a new recipe to commemorate your first time cooking with CBD-rich hemp flower.

Top 5 best ways to cook with CBD flower

Are you ready for some delicious CBD flower recipes? Whether you’re adventurous enough to add hemp buds to your food or you’d rather use DIY CBD oil, check out the following five CBD flower cooking ideas to get started:

1. Griddle some hemp flower pancakes
You’re used to making pancakes with blueberries or bananas, but have you ever thrown CBD-rich hemp flower into the equation? Most of the methods of cooking with CBD flower we’ll list in this section call for CBD oil instead of CBD flower nugs, but when it comes to pancakes, you might want to experiment with grinding decarboxylated hemp flower directly into your batter.

It’s true that the bioavailability of orally-ingested CBD is greatly reduced when this cannabinoid isn’t paired with a lipid, but you can overcome this hurdle by making sure to slather plenty of butter on your flapjacks. If the taste of hemp in your pancakes is slightly overwhelming, take Monarch and the Milkweed owner Andrew LeStourgeon’s advice and add some chocolate chips into the mix.

2. Cook a tropical CBD coconut oil stir fry
This recipe calls for the CBD-rich coconut oil we told you how to make in “3 Ways to Make CBD Oil Using CBD Flower.” Coconut oil is already one of the most common oils to use with stir fries, and adding your DIY CBD oil into the mix will infuse unique flavors and relaxing benefits.

If you’d like, you can also add ground-up, decarboxylated hemp buds to your fried mix of veggies and other ingredients. Hemp flower adds a unique texture to savory foods, and combining CBD from two separate sources could boost the potency of your hemp-infused meal. Just make sure you take Portland cannabis consultant Janelle Lasalle’s advice into account by cooking your stir fry at a relatively low temperature to avoid destroying the terpenes in your CBD oil or flower.

3. Make brownies with CBD-rich butter
It’s certainly possible to make CBD-rich hemp brownies the old-fashioned way by simply adding ground-up hemp flower to brownie mix and putting the resulting concoction in your oven. For a more refined approach, however, use the CBD cannabutter recipe we detailed in “3 Ways to Make CBD Oil Using CBD Flower.” CBD-infused butter is perfect for baked goods even if you shouldn’t apply it topically.

4. Offer a CBD-infused olive oil bread dip
Whether you’re used to throwing dinner parties at your home or sitting down to an occasional family meal usually marks the extent of your culinary passion, there’s never a wrong time to raise the bar slightly with a fancy appetizer. In American culture, we often pair pre-dinner bread with butter, but in parts of Europe, it’s more common to dip bread in olive oil. Prepare some CBD-infused olive oil by following the process we laid out in “3 Ways to Make CBD Oil Using CBD Flower,” and get ready to entertain.

5. Pair your meal with an “herbal” tea
Just like many other herbs, it’s possible to make CBD-rich hemp flower into tea simply by filling a tea strainer with hemp buds and placing your strainer in hot water. Since CBD is fat-soluble and not water-soluble, however, this approach won’t provide you with very much bioavailability. Therefore, you might want to pair your delicious CBD flower tea with either the CBD-infused butter or CBD-rich coconut oil we provided recipes for in “3 Ways to Make CBD Oil Using CBD Flower.”

You can also make cannabis tea using CBD-infused honey, which is just about as simple to make as any of the homemade CBD oils we’ve already mentioned. Many tea drinkers already infuse their hot beverages with honey, making CBD honey the perfect solution.

Whichever way you end up preparing it, we recommend you use Secret Nature Papaya Nights CBD flower for your canna-tea experiments. Whether you add it to honey or coconut oil or simply grind up some Papaya Nights buds and put them in a tea strainer, the terpenes in this fruity sativa strain blend perfectly with red teas like rooibos.