In cooking with a lot of herbs, if you crush them you end up releasing different flavors then you get if you slice them. Cutting up fresh basil with a sharp knife = good. Crushing fresh basil = foul brown goop. As long as the bud isn't bone dry, it makes some sense to limit damage by cutting rather than grinding. MBM would fall on the side of crushing. If you are using something other than that it might be worth a try just slicing the bud up with a sharp knife to see if there was a noticeable difference. As Like2Grow says though, cutting it up or grinding might not really be needed at all provided you can immerse all the bud and are giving it a long enough run.
In cooking with a lot of herbs, if you crush them you end up releasing different flavors then you get if you slice them. Cutting up fresh basil with a sharp knife = good. Crushing fresh basil = foul brown goop. As long as the bud isn't bone dry, it makes some sense to limit damage by cutting rather than grinding. MBM would fall on the side of crushing. If you are using something other than that it might be worth a try just slicing the bud up with a sharp knife to see if there was a noticeable difference. As Like2Grow says though, cutting it up or grinding might not really be needed at all provided you can immerse all the bud and are giving it a long enough run.
The blade on the Magical Butter Machine I have is a nasty little slicer probably about an inch long. Speed is blender like when in use. Even with the one hour setting oil has no big pieces left at the end of an hour which only uses the chopper a small part of the hour.
Grinding before hand will net you less total cannabinoids and terpenes in the output, but it works fine.
Chopping them up in the mixture allows for all the contents of the trichomes to be caught in the machine, rather than on your grinder, the air, etc. But the difference is probably insignificant for your purposes.
Yeah we use a Ardent to infuse and we have a oil press that strain's it and extracts every drop of oil but there is klno need to choo up the bud if you decarb it right
Yeah we use a Ardent to infuse and we have a oil press that strain's it and extracts every drop of oil but there is klno need to choo up the bud if you decarb it right