Cart oil is not an old-timey lubricant for your horse-drawn carriage. It’s concentrated cannabis oil that goes inside vape cartridges or vape juice with weed.

However, your vape isn’t the only place to use your cart oil. It can also be used as an active ingredient in homemade edibles.

Before you start cracking open all of your cart oil and pouring it into the mixing bowl, it’s essential to understand how to use it properly in edibles and which cart oil is okay to use.

What is Cart Oil?

While there are many different compositions of cart oil on the market, the highest-quality cart oil contains two ingredients: a cannabis extract or extracts like THC, the cannabinoid found in cannabis plants that gets users “high,” or CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid with health benefits like pain relief; and terpenes to add flavor with therapeutic effects.

Lower-quality cart oils may also contain a thinning agent like MCT oil, PG (Propylene Glycol), or VG (Vegetable Glycerin). 

The difference between cart oil and regular cannabis flower is that it is much more concentrated, often with at least five times the strength. The oil that goes inside the best-quality carts is extracted using solvent-based methods, which leave less harmful residue than other cheaper methods. 

Can You Make Edibles with Cart Oil?

The short answer is yes, you can make edibles using cart oil. But first, you must check if your cart oil is safe for ingestion. If you buy distillate and live resin cartridges, then you should be good to go because the oil is pure cannabis extract.

Like with most cannabis extracts, start with a small amount first, and don’t eat more if you don’t feel the effects right away. Remember, we all metabolize things differently, and it can take a couple of hours to feel anything from edibles. Cart oil will likely deliver a more potent edible than other traditional methods like butter. 

Benefits of Using Cart Oil for Edibles

Cart oil is excellent for vaping, but it may also become your go-to for homemade edibles. Unlike other methods, like making your own cannabutter, you know the potency of your cart oil and can select a higher concentration of cannabinoids.

You don’t have to prepare it in any way before use because it is already decarboxylated oil. Cart oil is also much less messy and available in small concentrated amounts that are easy to store and measure. 

Challenges of Using Cart Oil for Edibles

While cart oil can help make excellent homemade edibles, there are a few issues that anybody considering it should be aware of before trying. If you’re following a recipe, it’s hard to know exactly how much a dose is as the potency of one measurement may differ from the next.

Additionally, if you don’t like the intense flavors and odors that terpenes provide and prefer an edible that doesn’t taste like cannabis at all, it may be difficult to mask these flavors from cart oil. Making a batch of edibles may require multiple carts, and different cart oils have varying cannabinoid profiles, which may mean some edibles hit a lot harder than others. 

How to Use Cart Oil in Edibles

Unlike some other forms of cannabis, THC cart oil has already gone through the process of decarboxylation during the extraction process, which means it is ready to go straight out of the cart.

Brownies and cookies are a popular choice among edible lovers. If you make baked goods, add plenty of fats like butter or oil to bind nicely with the cart oil. Stir well to ensure the cart oil is evenly distributed throughout your mixture, and never bake on too high a heat. You’ll need to use oil like MCT or coconut oil with lecithin as an emulsifier for gummies. 

Safety Considerations and Precautions

Making edibles comes with its own risks. It’s essential not to overdo it when you make your edibles with cart oil due to how potent the liquid is. Start small and get a vibe check on your edibles to see how strong they are.

If you make them too strong, you can always take smaller doses to avoid accidental overconsumption. Side effects of eating too big a dose of edibles include getting too high and staying high for a long time, which can lead to anxiety and more. Try distracting yourself with calming activities and steady, mindful breaths if you’re feeling overwhelmed after consuming edibles. 

Edibles made using cart oil have a longer shelf life than edibles made using cannabis flower because the THC-infused oil is already decarboxylated and stable enough to last a long time inside the cartridge. 

Conclusion

You can use your cart oil to make edibles as long as it is safe for ingestion and doesn’t contain any ingredients other than cannabis extract and terpenes. Its stability makes it an excellent choice for making edibles because it is easy to handle, has already been decarboxylated, and provides a longer shelf life than regular cannabis flower. Making edibles is a fun way to consume cannabis, but always do it responsibly and safely.