Building a Cannabis Pantry

A friend asked us recently: if I were starting from scratch, what would I keep in the cabinet? Here’s the list. Nothing exotic. Nothing you can’t buy at a competent dispensary or a competent grocery. Everything earns its shelf space.

The tools

• A digital kitchen scale that reads to 0.01 g. Non-negotiable. You cannot dose by eye.
• A baking sheet, parchment paper, and an oven you trust at 240°F. This is your decarb station.
• A small mason jar with a tight lid for infusing. A double-boiler if you’re doing it stovetop; a slow cooker if you’re doing it overnight; a Levo or Magical Butter if you’re doing it often.
• A fine-mesh strainer and a set of cheesecloths. For straining infusions clean.
• Glass storage — amber dropper bottles for tinctures, glass jars for oils, never plastic. Cannabis fats degrade plastic over time.

The infusions

Keep two on hand at any moment.

• A neutral cannabis olive oil, dosed at 2 mg of THC per teaspoon. This is your everyday cooking oil for finishing pasta, dressing salads, dipping bread. We make it in 250 mL batches.
• A cannabis butter, dosed at 5 mg per tablespoon. This is your baking butter for shortbread, cake, browned-butter pasta, the very occasional toast. We make it in 100 g sticks and freeze.

If you’re only making one, make the oil. It’s more flexible.

The tinctures

A glycerin or alcohol tincture is the most precise dosing tool you can keep on a table. We pre-measure pipettes at:

• 2.5 mg — the conversational microdose.
• 5 mg — the standard, equivalent to a small cocktail.
• 10 mg — the second-glass, dose with caution.

Label them. Tape the labels. Put them in a high cabinet, away from sight, away from heat.

The flower

You don’t need 50 jars. You need five.

1. A limonene-led daytime hybrid. Mid-proof, 16–18% THC. Wedding Cake class.
2. A pinene-led focus strain. Mid-proof, 18–20%. Jack Herer class.
3. A caryophyllene-led evening. GG4 or Bubba Kush class.
4. A myrcene-led nighttime. Granddaddy Purple class.
5. A linalool-led dessert. LA Confidential class.

Five jars, five terpenes, every meal answered.

What we don’t keep

• Concentrates. Beautiful, deeply flavorful, but the dose math is brutal and a slip-up is a long evening.
• Sweets dosed above 5 mg. A 25 mg gummy in the kitchen drawer is a future mistake.
• Anything we can’t identify in the dark. Label everything. Date everything.

The pantry above will carry you through 95% of dinners. The other 5% you’ll improvise. That’s when it gets fun.