Buying7 min
A quiet standard for buying saffron
Buy less, from a named place, in whole threads, and use it while it still smells like itself.
The luxury version of saffron is a jar you trust enough to use. Trust comes from a few plain facts. The seller names a region. The threads are whole. The yellow style is either trimmed on purpose or left on purpose, and they can say which. The price per gram sits in the range of the other honest jars, not a tenth of them. Someone at the company will answer a question about the harvest.
Use it. Saffron in a cabinet is a souvenir. Saffron in rice on a Tuesday is the point of the crop. A half-gram jar is enough for a handful of real meals. If the first meal is ordinary, you are out the price of lunch and you have learned something. If the first meal is floral and a little wild, you have found a house saffron. Stay with that packer until they give you a reason to leave.
What to give
Give the small jar, and write on the card: crush it with a little sugar, pour hot water over it, wait fifteen minutes, then put it in rice. A person who has never bloomed saffron will otherwise shake a few dry threads onto a finished dish and wonder what the fuss was.
Rumi Spice's Saffron Lover Gift Set was listed at $330 on their collection page when we looked. That is a gift for someone who already cooks with saffron every week and will finish the box while it is alive. For everyone else, the ten-dollar jar is the more serious present, because it will be used. The per-gram case for and against the big tin is on Saffron Cost.
We do not rank these companies. We do not have a secret score. Both sell real Afghan saffron under their own names. Read their pages.
If a tin is far cheaper per gram than these jars and the picture is a mound of powder, walk on. Powder is where dye hides. The shape of an honest thread is on Saffron Threads.