Foodies love everything about saffron, except the price

Dipen Shah wanted his fix. So he did what he does every time he gets the itch. He peeled off a few $10 bills, scraped together the quarters at the bottom of his desk drawer and hustled over to DiBruno Bros., Philadelphia’s premier gourmet and cheese shop. He could almost taste what he had been craving all day: saffron.

“When I need it, I need it,” said Shah, 27, fondling his precious $65 tin of tiny threads.

Shah, along with other foodies, chefs and the just plain curious, have discovered saffron, an intensely pungent, thread-like spice culled from the stigma, or the top of the female part, of the saffron crocus flower. A pinch gives Spanish paella its color, French bouillabaisse its kick and risotto Milanese its distinctiveness. Shah likes it in his ice cream.

Shah can’t quite put his finger on the flavor other than to call it “extreme.” Saffron lovers are often divided over how to describe the taste. Some compare it to tea leaves--if you were of a mind to eat them. Others say it’s akin to burned flowers. Bob Reskin, the owner of Handcrafted Events, a catering company in Oakland, Calif., fumbled for words.

“Saffron tastes like licorice or Pernod,” he said. “Wait, it has a little rum and honey quality. Or maybe it’s like when there’s too much gingerbread in something. Have you ever smoked cloves? It’s actually kind of like that.”

Whatever saffron tastes like, foodies know that saffron consumption gives them a certain gastronomic status. A saffron fiend is not unlike a mushroom lover who prefers truffles or a cheese connoisseur who will only eat French tourmalet.

The habit doesn’t come cheaply. It may sit innocently enough among such regulars as cinnamon and nutmeg, but saffron is the caviar of the spice rack.

Since only a few threads flavor an entire dish, saffron is sold in minuscule amounts in bottles containing vials or plastic baggies. With a price of $40 to $65 for a 1-ounce jar, saffron is about one-tenth the price of gold and has long since passed the price of silver. Saffron is expensive because of labor costs: The flower stigmas from which it is made must be handpicked. It can take up to a quarter of a million flowers to produce just one pound of the spice.

Yet sales are booming. According to Juan San Mames, a saffron importer in San Francisco, the United States imported 5 metric tons of saffron 20 years ago. Today, the United States imports nearly triple that amount.

Some critics contend that saffron is one of those luxury items that attract people who believe quality is directly proportional to price.

“It’s like most very expensive food products that people prize,” said Alan Richman, a food and wine critic for GQ magazine. “Who knows if they really consider the taste?”

Richman himself doesn’t go looking for saffron, but he recognizes it when he sees it, or when he doesn’t.

“If you’re going to pay $7.95 for paella, chances are there’s no saffron in it even if the recipe called for it,” he said. “But if you’re paying $28.95, I would hope there’d be some.”

Other food experts maintain that saffron’s distinct taste is indispensable in the kitchen. Coleman Andrews, the editor in chief of the culinary magazine Saveur, scoffed at the idea that saffron was merely a food snob favorite.

“Saffron is extremely expensive, but extremely flavorful,” he said. “There’s nothing like that taste.”

Many of New York’s top-rated restaurants agree. The menu at Daniel lists a pear-orange melba with saffron sabayon for $13. Cafe Gray offers its summer ragout with saffron and fennel for $17. And Cafe Boulud has Vermont rabbit in a saffron jus for $30.

The best way to consume the spice seems to be at home, where the cook can determine the cost per portion by the size of his pinch. San Mames, the importer, sells his 1-ounce jar for just under $40 and says it is very affordable.

“You can get 907 portions out of one of my ounces,” he said. “That’s only 4 miserable cents a meal.”

Richman, who like many saffron owners got his as a gift from a friend who traveled oversees, believes he wasn’t alone when he squirreled away the spice in some hidden rack only to forget it was there.

“There’s hundreds of millions of dollars of saffron in reserve in this country,” he said. “Next to the gold reserve at Fort Knox, it’s probably the most valuable in the country.”

Wendy Klein, a 35-year-old copy supervisor at Simon & Schuster, also got her saffron as a gift. She keeps the threads under a dark cloth in her Waldwick, N.J., kitchen cabinet because she fears that light damage will weaken the taste.

“I have them wrapped up like they should be listed on my insurance policy,” she said, laughing.

While saffron’s flavor is up for debate, no one mistakes its color.

“They called The Gates in Central Park saffron, and they were right,” Klein said, referring to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic fabric display last winter. “It’s exactly that dusty, burnt orange shade.”

Saffron has a long history. It was mentioned in the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon right next to frankincense and myrrh; Roman women used it to dye their hair; and Pliny recommended it as a hangover cure. And 1960s rock star Donovan recorded “Mellow Yellow,” a song about a girl named Saffron.

But purists say yellow is not a color they want anywhere near their saffron. Yellow in the spice packet means someone picked the stamen, the male flower part with no culinary value.

“These guys that have yellow in there or use ground saffron, they don’t know what they’re taking about,” said San Mames. “They might as well be selling paprika.”

Not everyone has joined the revolution. In the Whole Foods Market in New York’s Union Square one recent Saturday, customers weaved in and out of the spice aisle. Oregano, chili powder and even paprika flew off the shelves. Ramon Berez, who was stocking them, hurried to keep up with the demand.

The saffron wasn’t moving as fast. Asked why not, Berez shrugged and pointed to the price tag: $8.99 for just 4 percent of an ounce.

“That ain’t no salt and pepper,” he said.

E-mail: shc2105@columbia.edu