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October 2005, 6 am. We are in Taliouine, in the heart
of the Berber country, in the middle of the Sirwa Mountains, in
the western Anti-Atlas. A few indistinct silhouettes in the pale
light of dawn, wrapped up in wool djellabas, and shawls and scarves
around the head, to protect oneself against the biting cold are
fighting against sleep, while they climb in the small lorries that
drive them into the mountains, a few dozen kilometres away, to harvest
saffron. The little blues flowers have blown in the night, and they
have to be harvested before the sun is too high to damage them and
destroy the vitamins in the spice. The whole family takes part,
they have only two to three hours to harvest all the flowers in
the few hectares hanging on the mountains’ slopes. After that,
they have a long day working at home, in semi-dark rooms, where
they cut the precious stigmas and dry them during several weeks,
to finally obtain this so precious saffron. The next night, new
flowers will bloom, and the harvest will start again, at dawn.
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Aïcha Arouka shows her harvest of the
morning
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A gesture repeated more than a thousand time
to avoid that sun dammages the flowers
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All that is done entirely manually. At first, one has to walk
bended towards the ground, to distinguish in the mere darkness the
small flowers, and cut them with a precise movement of three fingers.
And then for endless hours, one has to repeat the same mechanical
gesture, open the flower, pinch the stigmas, throw the petals away,
take a new flower, open, pinch… 140 flowers are needed to
make a gram of dried saffron.
So is prepared saffron, the most expensive spice in the world,
a kind of powder gold. End-user prices start around 16 euros pro
gram, up to 30 euros in Europe, depending of the quality. It gives
an incomparable taste to the dishes, a deep yellow colour to Indian
monks’ robes and to kasbahs’ cedar roofs in South Morocco,
where it is also known for its curative virtues
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Hold, pinch, remove... 3 stigma
per flower, one has to do this 140 times to get a gram of dried
saffron. |
| Taliouine is situated in the Sirwa Mountains, the traditional saffron
production area. A cooperative, Souktana, was created in the eighties,
and takes care of quality control, and of marketing and selling of
the 2-3 tons of saffron annually produced. You can know more about
the cooperative by
visiting its site, here (www.safran-souktana.com). It’s
a place where you can taste saffron and buy it with fearing counterfeiting
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Because of its high price, saffron is one of the most often counterfeited
food products, just after alcohol. Ways are numerous and diverse,
from the simple addition of stigma of similar-looking flowers that
don’t have the same qualities (like turmeric or calendula) to
putting the spice in a kind of oil to make it heavier (which can be
recognized through the lightly sugared taste it gets in the process).
All kind of components can be mixed with the spice when it is sold
as powder. Brick have even been found in “saffron” |
| You’ll be offered saffron in the souqs, and even
in the street. Some members of the cooperative keep a part of the
harvest for themselves, and try to get a better price by selling it
directly. But it can be any kind of mix.
Do never buy saffron in powder, always as whole stigma. They must
be thin and long, with a dark red colour. The smell must be strong,
and the stigma must leave a stain on your finger. They must be put
into a box or a bag that protects them from light. And the price
must e reasonable… which unfortunately means “not too
low”. Anything under 20 dirhams pro gram in Morocco, 4 to
5 euros pro gram in Europe, is doubtful.
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| What to do with saffron ? |
| On top of being a wonderful cooking ingredient, saffron
has healing virtues. It has been used forever in traditional medicine,
to calm spasms, toothache, painful menstrual, and liberate energy.
With a high concentration (half a gram to a gram) it is used as abortion
mean, but this is very dangerous, as such a dose can give hallucinations,
convulsions, and even risk coma. 5 grams are considered as a lethal
dose. The normal use should stay within 0,10 gram a day, which is
already a lot, as this spice has a strong flavour. Saffron was used
in traditional drugs, like Sydenham Laudanum, or ossicreo plaster. |
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| Saffron
in the kitchen |
| Saffron needs time to develop its taste and colour, but a long cooking
destroys its aroma and vitamins. The best solution is to dilute it
the day before, in a small cup of water and use this water and the
end of the cooking time.
To dilute saffron, you should put the stigma into cold water for
a whole night. Take half a litre for a 1 gram bag. Before use, filter
with a small strainer or a muslin – which will be reserved
for it, because it will get the colour of saffron. Eventually, you
can use again the stigma for a second dilution. Such a quantity
would be enough to prepare rice for twenty people !
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You can also follow the Indian method, and dilute
it half and hour ago into a small cup of lukewarm milk.
Rice is a good friend of saffron, and this pair can be found in
the Spanish paella, the Italian risotto, or the “zarda pullao”
which is a banquet meal for Indian Muslims, often served at the
end of Ramadan.
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Saffron accompanies very well white meats, chicken, poultry and
lamb, either in Moroccan tajines or in Indian byrianies (a thick sauce,
prepared with saffron, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, anis and other
spices…). You can use it as a part o a slightly acid marinade,
with salt, ginger, dried onions and a little bit of cumin, where your
chicken will soak during the night.
In Morocco, saffron is in all tajines, with chicken, lamb, beef,
where it gives a nice colour and a delicate fragrance to meat and
vegetables.
Last but not least, it suits fishes, especially in papillotte.
A tablespoon of your diluted saffron in the papillotte, one decorative
stigma on the fish once in the plate, and you serve a refined and
original dish.
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| As a dessert, it gives its fragrance to milk and yoghourt. In England,
the traditional recipe of buns with saffron comes from the time when
it was a big producer (in Saffron Walden town), and you can also mi
it with the dough in a lot of cakes, like “Madeleine”
or puddings or any of the same type.
Finally, we can recommend saffron tea, which is drunk during the
whole day in Taliouine. Made with green tea, it is prepared nearly
like mint tea. In a tea pot, pour cold water, a handful of tea leaves,
a pinch of saffron, and let simmer for a quarter of an hour. At
the end, add sugar to your taste. Serve and enjoy. You can use the
leaves soaked in saffroned water for a second tea pot.
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Attention: never use wooden tools when cooking saffron.
They would get nicely yellow!
Here you can find a few
recipes with saffron, from all places in the world. |
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| As
a pigment |
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Saffron has other use, he main one being a traditional dye, thanks
to its deep and vibrant yellow. Saris of Indian monks, wool threads
used for carpets, even some leather are coloured with saffron. In
Roman’s time, saffron was nearly as precious as crimson.
It was used for wedding dresses in Tyre and Sidon. It is found
also in houses interiors paintings, for example on the luxurious
cedar roofs of the south Morocco Kasbahs.
The geometrical patterns were made with natural pigments, indigo
for the blue, mint for the green, and of course saffron for the
yellow. Thanks to indigo and saffron qualities, we can still admire
the wonderful decorations of Telouet or Taourirt Kasbah, or the
alawites palace. TO give such a strong colour, saffron is directly
plunged in warm water |
| Saffron is also used for traditional make-up. The red
dot that Hindi women paint on their forefront is very well known,
much more than the saffron face and hair paintings that Berber women
wear in the intimacy of their celebrations. Saffron is used in a paste
that covers hair and enhances the face, around cheeks and chin, some
patterns are known to protect for evil-luck. |
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| Read
more information, about history and legends of saffron |
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