Dear Cheri,

I am making meals with my cannabis infused oil and I wanted to know if it's OK to freeze meals infused with THC oil? If so does it take away from the potency or quality?  I am making hot pockets but would like to freeze them and microwave when ready to eat.

Adam

Hello Adam,

Yes!  You can freeze foods made with cannabis infused oil or marijuana butter without compromising the potency or quality of the medicine.  In fact I recommend doing so.

You can also freeze infused marijuana butter or cannabis oil for longer storage.  Simply bring to room temperature when you are ready to use.  Keep in mind that fats can still go rancid in the freezer, so try to use within six months.

Freezing medicated foods makes a lot of sense.  Let's face it you probably don't want to, nor should you, eat an entire batch of medicated foods at once, and freezing allows you more flexibility with portion control and the luxury of saving your medicated foods for when you really need/want them.  When I wrote The Cannabis Gourmet Cookbook, I purposely tried to design the recipes so they could be easily portioned and, whenever possible, frozen for longer storage, look for the "Freezer Friendly" notation throughout the book.

I consulted Dr. Jeffrey Raber at The Werc Shop (one of the world's premier testing labs) about your question.  While he had no hard data on food cannabinoid stability when frozen, he did say that cold temperatures do slow chemical degradations so there shouldn't be any significant issues, although each food might react slightly differently.

Some foods do freeze better than others (for detailed instructions check out the non-cannabis cookbook I wrote,  The Complete Idiot's Guide to Easy Freezer Meals), but the presence or absence of cannabis in the recipe's butter or oil is not a factor.

What you need to be concerned about more than cold is heat.  While some heat is necessary to decarboxylize the cannabis -- the chemical reaction that turns the raw plant's THC-acid into THC -- remember that too much heat will destroy it.  THC is rendered useless at 392 degrees F,  but it starts to break down long before that.  You can bake at higher temperatures of 400 degrees F or more, so long as the food itself does not get any hotter than, ideally, about 325 degrees F.