Saffron Spice
Saffron is a spice made from the stigmas and styles of the saffron crocus (Latin name crocus sativus). The stigma is part of the flower that receives pollen and the style attaches the stigma to the flower.
The countries that produce most saffron are Spain, Iran, India, Greece and Morocco.
The stigmas and styles of the crocus sativus are hand-picked. A single crocus has three stigmas that together weigh less than 0.02 oz. After being picked, the saffron is quickly dried and stored in airtight containers (to stop the saffron from losing pungency and flavor). The dried saffron stigmas are called threads.
It takes something between 50,000 and 75,000 flowers to produce a pound of dried saffron (that’s about the size of one football field full of flowers).
It takes about 20 hours of labor to pick the saffron so it’s pretty easy to understand why saffron is the most expensive spice. A pound of dried saffron can cost over US$5,000!!! Small containers of saffron can be bought at most good supermarkets.
With saffron costing so much, it’s hardly surprising that saffron powder is sometimes adulterated with other substances (such as turmeric powder) and sold as pure saffron by unscrupulous people. If you always buy saffron threads, instead of saffron powder, then you know that this is not happening.
Saffron is a bitter spice and only a little is needed in cooking. It only needs about 10 threads to be added to rice to give it the typical saffron yellow/orange color and taste (the saffron threads are lightly crushed between your fingers and then soaked in a small amount of hot water for about 10-15 minutes before being added to the cooking rice). There’s an easy Saffron Rice recipe on the Curry Focus website.
A “pinch of saffron” is 0.004 oz and that is a measure that is way too small to measure in the average kitchen. When you buy saffron threads, check the net weight on the container, count the number of threads in the container and then do the simple math to find out how many threads are in a pinch. My reckoning is that there are about 10 threads in a pinch.
As well as being used in cooking, saffron is also used in medicines (saffron has cancer suppressing and anti oxidant properties), perfumes and clothes dyes (Buddhist robes in India are saffron dyed).
