The world’s most expensive spice: Saffron
Saffron is a type of spice used in seasoning, perfumes, textile dye and medicine. It is the world’s most expensive spice.
It is usually made by plucking stigmas from the saffron crocus and then drying them into red-coloured threads.
It tastes bitter, smells like hay and has “metallic notes.”
Half of the world’s saffron production comes from Iran. The rest mainly comes from Spain, India and Greece.
It is used for both food and drink, in baked foods, curries, even liquor.
In medicine, saffron has been shown to have potential anti-cancer and anti-aging properties.
It is pricey because of the difficulty in extracting big amounts of the small stigmas, and that large amounts of flowers are needed for this purpose. A mere 0.45kg of dry saffron requires the harvesting of a whopping 50,000 flowers (some say 75,000) – that’s a football field’s area of planting! That works out to be 40 hours of intense manual labour to produce a mere kilogram of the stuff. After harvesting, there are many other processes that need to be completed before the final product is arrived at.
Even the price of bulk low-grade saffron can reach USD500 per pound.
In Western countries the average retail price is around USD1,000 per pound!
That’s even more expensive than gold? I wonder if smuggling of saffron is rampant since probably several hundred dollars’ worth of it can easily fit in a hollowed-out Logo flash drive.
The spice is used sparingly: only a few grams for medicinal use and a few strands in cooking: a pound of saffron has between 70,000 and 200,000 strands.
Source
Wikipedia
