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Hey SweetSue,
I'm confused. I have not messed with the pressure cooker so I'm trying to just follow along mentally. So you are recommending doing the extraction in a regular pot of some kind and then straining the plant out and THEN put the oil in the pressure cooker to decarb. First, I'm having a hard time envisioning the plant mtl "frying in the oil". What temp are you talking about in the cooker? I don't understand why it would hurt it at all. That being said, I don't know why it would be necessary to have the plant in there at that point cause there should not be anything in there to decarb anyway. So, those of you experimenting with pressure; are you simply trying to decarb with it or are you doing an extraction? I need a little clarification in case Canyon wants to play with that.
First off, here's a link to Cannafan's exquisite tutorial on loading pictures into the gallery and then posting them to a thread.
Photo Gallery Guide - How to Resize, Upload & Post Photos
Now to answer your questions.
The decarb is done in the pressure cooker, simply by placing the wet buds into the loosely-capped jars. When decarb is done the plant material is blended with the olive oil and placed into a hot water bath for two hours, stirring as often as you think of it. You're simply infusing the oil from this point.
There's no real concern with frying the plant material in the oil, but there is a real danger of burning the oil and destroying the cannabinoids if you're not careful with the process, though to be honest you'd have to be so negligent that it's not likely to happen to anyone. We don't use the MB2 to make CCO for this very reason, it can burn the oil.
Now, you can also both decarb and extract in the pressure cooker if you use PsyCro's directions, which are found at the beginning of the FHO thread. I hesitate to recommend that process because I'm not convinced that we get enough of the water out, but then I haven't tried a pressure cooker yet. I feel safer personally decarbing in the pressure cooker and then infusing the oils in a hot water bath.
I feel best about making it the original way, in a hot oil bath, but I understand that this is simply me feeling more comfortable with the first method I used. There's been no testing of the FHO yet, and we don't know how much water gets retained in the oil when you do the entire process in the pressure cooker as PsyCro does. It's certainly easier that way, and he claims the oil is at least as potent as his original approach with the hot oil bath.
There are no straightforward answers with cannabis other than generalizations like cannabinoids kill cancer cells. The plant forces us to experiment.