Cooking with THC: How to Use a Calculator
THC Calculator: Know What You’re Making
The Home Edibles Problem
Making your own cannabutter, infused oil, or edibles at home? The biggest challenge isn’t the cooking—it’s figuring out how strong your finished product actually is.
You start with flower, make some infused butter, bake a batch of brownies… and then what? Is each brownie 5mg? 25mg? 50mg? Without doing the math, you’re essentially guessing. And that guessing game is exactly how people end up with batches that are way too strong—or disappointingly weak.
Why a THC Calculator Matters for Home Cooks
A THC calculator takes the guesswork out of making edibles. Here’s what it does: it helps you figure out the approximate THC content in your finished product based on what you’re starting with.
You’ll need to know:
• The THC percentage of your flower (check the label on your Canuvo product)
• How much flower you’re using
• How much butter or oil you’re making
• How many servings your recipe yields
Plug those numbers in, and you get a pretty good estimate of how much THC is in each cookie, gummy, or brownie. Not perfect—there’s always some THC loss during cooking—but a whole lot better than flying blind.
Consistency Matters
Think about it: when you buy edibles from a dispensary, you know exactly what you’re getting. A 10mg gummy is a 10mg gummy. But when you’re making them at home, batch-to-batch consistency is tough without doing the calculations.
One batch of cookies might hit just right. The next batch, using “about the same” amount of butter? Could be twice as strong or half as weak. That’s frustrating at best, potentially uncomfortable at worst.
Starting with Quality Flower
The whole calculation starts with knowing your flower’s potency. All Canuvo products are lab-tested, so you’ll see the exact THC percentage right on the label. That number is your starting point.
From there, it’s basic math—but math that makes a real difference in what you end up with.
Common Home Infusion Scenarios
Making Cannabutter: If you’re using 7 grams of 20% THC flower to make 1 cup of butter, you can calculate approximately how many milligrams of THC are in each tablespoon. Then you know how much butter to use in your recipe for the strength you want.
Infused Coconut Oil: Same principle. Know your flower potency, know how much you’re using, know your final oil volume—calculate your per-serving dose.
Recipe Adjustments: Once you know the potency of your infused butter or oil, you can adjust your recipes up or down to hit your target dose.
The Reality of Home Cooking
Here’s the thing: home infusion isn’t an exact science. Some THC gets lost in the process—how much depends on your method, temperature, and cooking time. Most calculators assume around 70-90% efficiency, meaning you won’t extract 100% of the THC from your flower.
But even with that variability, calculating gives you a ballpark that’s far more reliable than “I threw some weed in butter and hoped for the best.”
Safety Through Knowledge
Cannabis researcher Deborah S. Hasin points out that understanding consumption patterns helps “identify potential risks and benefits of use and to provide meaningful safety information to the public.”
When you’re making edibles at home, that knowledge starts with knowing roughly what you’ve created. It means you can dose responsibly, share with friends without worry, and adjust future batches based on actual results.
Find Our THC Calculator
We’ve put together a straightforward THC calculator on our website to help you plan your home cooking projects. It’s free to use, no account needed, just practical math for practical people.
Start with quality flower from either our Biddeford or Bridgton locations, know your percentages, do the calculations, and create edibles you can actually trust.
Questions about which flower works best for infusions or how to use the calculator? Stop by either store. We’re happy to walk you through it—we’ve been helping folks figure this stuff out for 15 years now.
