Saffron: The Exotic Red Powder

saffron flower

Saffron in Italy is best known in Italy as a red powder to spread over Risotto alla Milanese. This red powder provides the risotto with its characteristic yellow color, and it adds color and flavor to other Italian rice-based dishes.

Navelli in Abruzzo, just south of the National Park of Gran Sasso, is considered the world capital for high quality saffron.

Saffron comes from a fall-blooming crocus flower (Above), Crocus

Dried saffron

Sativus. The flower has been cultivated, it is believed, for some 5000 years. In Greek and Roman times, it was used as a medicine and a dye as well as in cooking and as a flavoring for wine. Saffron is also cultivated in Spain, the Middle East, East Texas and India but it does not grow as well in India because it needs to be dried for long dry periods.

It takes from 45,000 to 90,000 crocus flowers to make one pound of Saffron (100,000 to 200,000 to make a kilogram). The

crocus flower is light purple but the stigmas, the part that provides the powder, are orange-red. The red powder gives the characteristic yellow color to food where it is sprinkled.

Today the total production of saffron in Navelli is 80Kg a year. This is because the only usable parts of the flower are the red stigmas, which need to be separated from the rest of the flower by hand. The associated cost of this process is quite high in Italy where manual labor is much more expensive than in other counties. The quality of the Italian saffron is however reportedly superior, as Navelli uses only the stigmas while other countries also use other portions of the plant. Furthermore, like all crocuses, saffron is a crocus bulb and reproduces only by producing additional bulbs.

Paella, a saffron flavored Spanish dish quite popular in Italy

During the middle ages, Navelli was the most important Saffron source in Europe with distributors even in Northern Europe. This Italian saffron has a coloring powder well above average and a high content of safranale, the most important aromatic element. Another distinguishing factor is Navelli saffron is dried over oak ashes, which reduces its weight to 1/5th of the original. Preserving saffron is easy: it does not require preservatives or refrigeration, but only to be kept a clean, dry, dark place.