Saffron brings out the ugly in humans.

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Ever since a snake sold Eve on a dodgy apple, humans have complained about the low quality and high cost of their food and drink.

Traditionally the blame was almost always placed on merchants who were suspected of diluting, substituting, counterfeiting and mislabelling foodstuffs to pad out their profits.

To the ancients the rarest commodity in a food market was trust and they complained long and hard about food fraud. Pliny the Elder, Martial and Galen all bitterly lamented widespread fraud that deprived even the wealthy access to quality wine, honey and olive oil.

There is graffiti surviving in Pompeii still testifying, some 2000 years later, to the poor quality of the wine sold in local taverns.

The outrage and mistrust is easy to understand. No one wants to be a rube and, let’s face it, often they were right to complain. They were absolutely being ripped off.

We shouldn’t be too smug either. Food fraud has never really gone away. Modern food fraud costs the food industry somewhere between 10 and 40 billion dollars a year and affects 10% of all commercially sold foods.

Think that’s extra virgin olive oil on your salad or a nice bit of cod in your fish and chips? You might want to think again.

When it comes to food fraud anything can be affected, but, in general, the more expensive the item the more likely it is that someone is trying to fake it. It’s good economics, the more expensive your target the greater return on your fraud.

There are plenty of examples of rare and expensive food stuffs being counterfeited, but nothing can compare to saffron for the sheer longevity of the counterfeit trade.

Saffron is our most expensive spice and we’ve been using it for at least 3,500 years. For just about that entire time, there have been those looking to profit by passing off something other than saffron as saffron.

Where Does Saffron Come From?

Saffron is entirely made up of small structures found in the flower of a plant called Crocus sativus. These structures are called stigmas and they are part of the reproductive organs of the flower.

Many flowering plants are hermaphrodites. That is the flower has both male and female parts. C. sativus is one of these hermaphroditic plants and the stigmas are the female parts.

Stigma are sticky and they are able to trap pollen, which is kind of like the sperm of the plant world. Once stuck on the stigma, pollen grows down, through another structure called the style, to the ovary where fertilisation takes place.

In many plants the stigma are small protuberances that sit on top of the style but in C. sativus they are longer red threads that are joined to the yellow style.

Pollen is actually more like a mobile testicle

I said that pollen is kind of like sperm. Which is kind of wrong.

Pollen is actually a tiny living organism, called a gametophyte, that is produced in the anther of a flower and is capable of producing sperm.

Technically, pollen produces sperm, like a testicle. It is a testicle, though, that is capable of survival for long periods of time outside the flower and of travelling many thousands of kilometres before fertilising another flower.

I can’t help thinking how different human culture would be if human males also released long-lived mobile testicles.

Why is Saffron so Expensive?

Saffron is expensive because in order to produce it you need to grow a large amount of C. sativus, harvest the flowers and then painstakingly separate the three stigmas from the rest of the flower.

It takes about 150,000 crocus flowers to make one kilo of saffron and, even today, the only way to separate the stigmas from the flower is by hand. Being careful to separate them from the styles as you go.

You also need to act quickly. The flowers bloom in the morning and will quickly wilt in the harsh sun. So they need to be hand-picked, plucked and quickly dried before being sealed in airtight containers.

Saffron was, and still is, expensive because this process is incredibly time consuming and has resisted all attempts at modernisation.

Apart from some of our, shall we say, more fundamental activities, producing saffron is one of the few things we do today the same way we did 3000 years ago.

Why Did People Pay for Saffron?

The reason people bought saffron was simple; they wanted to show off how rich they were.

Saffron has always been used in cooking, but historically it was also highly valued for it’s uses as a dye and perfume.

Saffron, when used as a dye, produces a distinctive golden hue that is impossible to achieve using any other dye. Because saffron was so expensive, being rich enough to afford enough saffron to dye entire pieces of clothing was an easy way to signal wealth.

In fact, any conspicuous consumption of saffron would do the trick: foods gilded with saffron, saffron perfume even saffron infused furniture; Suetonius tells us that Nero had the streets strewn with saffron on his entry to Rome. Nothing screamed money like saffron.

Even though times have changed, saffron is still with us and it is still expensive. But the super-wealthy of our day use sweaters to prove how much money they have.

Today, we generally buy saffron because of the colour and flavour it brings to our food.

I want some saffron chemistry!

The distinctive golden colour of saffron is a result of a class of pigments, common in plants, known as carotenoids.

The most abundant carotenoid in saffron is called crocin. Unlike most carotenoids crocin is water soluble thanks to sugar molecules attached to either end of the molecule.

This is why saffron is so good at colouring rice and other water-based foods. As the cells of the saffron break down during cooking the crocin dissolves in water and diffuses through the dish.

Carotenoids are also antioxidants which might explain some of saffron’s putative health benefits and definitely explains it’s sensitivity to sunlight and oxygen.

You want to keep saffron in a sealed container and in the dark because, as we discovered in the redox post, antioxidants can react with oxygen, changing their structure and destroying the flavour and colour of the saffron.

Roughly 160 other volatile compounds contribute to saffron’s bitter, slightly metallic hay-like flavour. But one of the most important is a terpene known as picrocrocin.

Terpenes are yet another class of plant molecule and they are responsible for many of the odours you find in the plant world, particularly in conifers but they are also behind the distinctive smell of cannabis, familiar to many from their college days.

Picrocrocin is bitter but when the saffron is dried, heat and enzymatic activity convert some of the picrocrocin to another terpene, called safranal, as well as a glucose molecule.

Safranal is not as bitter as picrocrocin so drying is necessary step to reduce bitterness and achieve the characteristic flavour of saffron.

One last molecule, memorably named 2-hydroxy-4,4,6-trimethyl-2,5-cyclohexadien-1-one, may be responsible for the dried-hay odour and flavour of saffron.

Saffron Fraud

It’s inevitable that something as desired and expensive as saffron would end up being counterfeited and adulterated. And there are a truly impressive number of ways that people have put their finger on the scales when selling saffron.

One common method is to bulk up saffron threads using similar looking fibres. Fibres made from beets, pomegranates or even red silk have been used, as well as structures that look like saffron from different flowers, like safflower or marigolds.

Likewise, other thread-like structures from the crocus flower, called anthers, have also been used for bulk. These yellow structures are part of the male reproduction system of the flower but are tasteless and so worthless.

Saffron threads have been made heavier by soaking them with a viscous liquid like honey, vegetable oil or glycerol. They’ve been impregnated with a yellow paste made of barium sulphate and it has been straight up mixed with borates, chlorides, carbonate, sulphate and other salts of sodium and potassium.

Powdered saffron is even easier to adulterate. Turmeric and paprika are common substitutes for real saffron, often including colourants that approximate the colour of real saffron.

Modern day labelling is another practise bordering on fraud. Turmeric or the thistle-like safflower plant have been labelled as ‘Indian’, ‘Mexican’ or ‘American’ saffron, the only real similarity being the price.

In short human ingenuity has been utilised to it’s fullest extent in the shabbier parts of the saffron trade. Even in ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder declared that “nothing is adulterated as much as saffron“.

Detecting Saffron Fraud

All this isn’t to say that people took saffron fraud lying down. In the middle ages, the city council of Nuremberg, a major saffron centre, paid saffron inspectors who were authorised to burn or bury alive saffron adulterers. Henry VIII also had saffron counterfeiters executed and Islamic authorities, more leniently, would just flog them.

Of course, to execute saffron fraudsters, you need to catch them first and, over the years, a lot of effort has been put into identify adulterated or fake saffron.

The ancients, and those living in medieval times, relied on those who knew quality saffron when they saw, smelt or touched it.

Proper experts could identify the aroma of saffron and the Romans, in particular, looked for a distinguishing “crunch” when the saffron was crushed in their hands.

In medieval times the behaviour of the threads in water was often used to identify saffron. What you should see is a yellow colouring slowly spreading through the water and you should smell saffron. The threads should also retain their typical red colour.

With a little more chemistry you can adapt this test. If you dry out the watery saffron extract and draw a rod dipped in sulphuric acid across the surface you should see a blue colour that immediately turns purple and then reddish brown.

This colour change is the result of characteristic saffron pigments, including molecules known as carotenoids, that react with the acid and change colour.

Today, fake saffron is still a huge problem and modern science has unleashed a barrage of sophisticated tests to measure the quality of saffron. They’re expensive though, so they’re normally only used on the most expensive top-tier saffron.

Most commercial saffron isn’t tested and in the absence of universal testing it’s thought that 20-30% of the world’s saffron supply is fake or adulterated.

It might be worth throwing some of your saffron in water every now and again.

Conclusion

Like most luxury goods, saffron has little intrinsic value. Sure, the culinary world would miss saffron if it was lost, but it’s such a subtle flavour and used so rarely that you’d hardly call it a staple.

What saffron really does is tell us an awful lot about ourselves.

Saffron is hard to make, that’s why it’s expensive, but demand has always been driven by one of our baser impulses. People bought saffron to show how much better they were than everyone else.

If Trump had been born four hundred years ago he would have been dripping with saffron.

On the other hand, the massive amount of fraud that has gone into the saffron trade, shows us just how ready humans are to defraud, cheat and steal from their fellow humans.

If Trump had been born four hundred years ago he would have been selling fake saffron.

No one comes out looking good in the history of saffron. Saffron is the beautiful spice but it sure brings out the ugly in human beings.