Improved Tincture
Tinctures can come from a variety of sources, but the two most popular seem to be glycerin based, for food, and alcohol based, for direct consumption. Well, alcohol is a poor solvent for cannabinoids, and burns to boot, and glycerin is positively terrible, it doesnt hold much in solution and it takes waaaaay to long to make, even if you heat it, and moreover it gets all sudsy if you add it to a water solution. But theres a better way: d-Limonene. This common industrial solvent is naturally manufactured from orange peel, and is a natural component of marijuana, where it is responsible for the citrus scent. You can get food grade online for quite cheap, it is perfectly safe to ingest and smells of oranges. Moreover, it is an incredible solvent for cannabinoids! The hardest wax concentrate (Or RSO, or ISO, or any concentrate) instantly dissolves into an equal volume of limonene to become a very thin, free flowing tincture. It is easiest to use a premade concentrate of some kind, and that will yield the most potent tincture, but you can use it to make tincture from herb as well. Herb can be breifly soaked in the smallest possible amount (enough to barely cover), then strained, to give a tincture that is free of chlorophyll and doesnt burst the cell walls of the plant material.
Why is this an advantage?
Potency. The limonene can hold a ridiculous amount in solution, allowing you to get potency unheard of with glycerin tinctures, and not matched even by alcohol tincture. You'd have to use a toxic substance like acetone to get cannabinoids to dissolve this well and at this level of saturation.
Furthermore, you can further dilute this tincture with an equal volume of alcohol, and get something that will mix into water. In the thread above, I detail how to use this with simple syrup and club soda to make orange soda, but it will stir equally well into tea, soups, juice, any water based beverage. Although you are adding some ethanol to make the limonene water soluable, the amount of alcohol per dose is still about 1/5 the best you can get with alcohol tincture. For example, 100mg concentrates mixed with 100mg limonene is about a teaspoon, and if you're adding another teaspoon of ethanol to that, and stirring it into an 8oz glass of soda, the soda is now half a proof or so, on par with all clear citrus sodas (all citrus sodas use up to .05% of ethanol to get the orange oil flavor to mix). If using this in soups or similar, because the limonene boils away at such a low temp, its best to cook the soup fully, then remove it from heat and add the tincture.
Alternately, limonene tincture can be diluted with glycerin of an equal volume in order to use it with e-cig atomizers. Please note that limonene is slightly acidic and so this tincture should not be vaporized by itself, it should be diluted in glycerin first. Don't let that scare you - the commercial company PureGold adds 10% limonene to all of the hash oils it proveds to dispensaries, and its a natural compenent of weed, and is an FDA GRAS food ingredient. If you dilute as described you will have an ecig mix that is 25% cannabinoids!
Advanced Medibles
Now, everyone knows about cannabutter and how to make it. The butter acts as a carrier solvent and spreads the cannabinoids throughout your dish. Unfortunately, butter is a poor solvent, and has water and solids as well as lipids, the end result being that you have to use a lot of butter for a decent amount of medication, I find about twice as much as is regularly called for by any given recipe. You can add glycerin tincture to avoid the fat OD, if you can stand the cloying heavy sweetness of it (it gives baked goods the little debbie consistency, gross!). If you've got budder, keif, or unpressed bubble, you can just sprinkle some into your recipe, but without a carrier to spread the cannabinoids evenly, this can lead to hotspots and oily clumps rising to the surface during cooking. Well, here are two different carrier suggestions. These are useful where the orange flavor imparted by the limonene tincture is undesirable. To use the techniques I describe you should start by taking your herb and concentrating it, at least into bubble, but preferably into oil.
If you are making sweets (baked goods, custards, pancakes, even cinnamon toast), take your concentrate and add an equal volume of powdered sugar, then chop with a putty knife or similar until the concentrate is evenly mixed. This will form tiny grains that are not sticky and can be used like sugar in all recipes. It will be half the sweetness of regular sugar, but as you only need a small amount per recipe, you can use your recipe like normal, just swapping out a teaspoon of sugar for the hash sugar. You should use commercially prepared powdered sugar, or if preparing at home, you should add 30% of potato or corn starch to your powdered sugar. This is important as the sugar will no longer act as a carrier when you mix this into your recipe. The starch in commercial powdered sugar will absorb the melted particles of cannabinoids and keep them mixed in with your recipe, so if using homemade sugar powder, add some!
If you are making savory items (breads, soups, stews, casseroles), take your concentrate and add an equal volume of starch, then chop with a putty knife or similar until the concentrate is evenly mixed. This will form tiny grains that are not sticky and can be used like flour/starch in all recipes.
A note about these methods: this is not the same as complexing with cyclodextrins, and doesnt make your concentrate water soluble. It just makes it have the physical properties necessary to disperse in your dish evenly without the need for a carrier solvent like butter, oil, or glycerin. Also, temperature restrictions are the same as with cannabutter - too much or too direct a heat can combust the cannabinoids, so you must bake at less than 350 and any stovetop cooking must be done at half power. If you are making a soup or stew, this can be alleviated by cooking your soup as normal until it is done, then removing from heat and throwing in your dose of concentrate/starch. Using the cannabis sugar for creme brulee, for example, where the sugar is being broiled or torched, would destroy most of the actives.The great advantage of these methods, besides the lack of fat, is how little you need to add. Since you're only doubling your volume of concentrate, you can sprinkle a very small amount of either into your recipe, as opposed to 1/4 cup of oil/butter per dose (what I find I must use to dissolve 1g of herbs worth of cannabinoids), and still get that recipe wide dispersion that the carrier oil/glycerin offers.
There, there's three new ways to cook with cannabis 
Give em a try, and let everyone know what you think!
