The long road of saffron, from the field to your plate

There is a short window each autumn, usually about two weeks, when the crocus fields open. The flowers come up overnight and have to be picked before the morning sun gets at them, because heat takes the scent straight out of the threads. So the picking starts in the dark, by hand, flower by flower, and the fields are quiet apart from the sound of people working.

Each flower gives three red threads. Three. That is why a pound of saffron takes something in the order of seventy thousand flowers, and why it has been worth more than its weight in most other things for about three thousand years.

What we look for when we buy

We buy whole threads, never ground. Ground saffron is the easiest thing in the world to cut with turmeric, safflower or paprika, and once it is powder you cannot tell by looking. Whole threads tell you the truth: they should be a deep red with a slightly paler, trumpet shaped end, dry enough to snap rather than bend, and they should smell of hay and honey at the same time.

There is a simple test anybody can do at home. Put a few threads in a glass of cold water. Real saffron gives up its colour slowly, over ten or fifteen minutes, and the threads stay red while the water turns gold. Anything dyed gives up its colour at once and the threads go pale. If the water turns red rather than gold, it is not saffron.

The colour should come out of it slowly. Anything in a hurry has been helped along.

Waking it up in the kitchen

Saffron thrown straight into a pot is mostly wasted. The scent and the colour sit inside the thread and need coaxing out. We grind a pinch with a little sugar in a small mortar, which stops the threads sticking to the sides, then pour over four or five spoons of hot but not boiling water and leave it alone for twenty minutes. What comes out is deep orange and smells like the whole restaurant.

A rule worth keeping

More is not better. Too much saffron turns bitter and medicinal, and it will bully everything else on the plate. For a pot of rice for six people we use about a level quarter teaspoon of ground threads, no more. If a dish tastes of saffron and nothing else, somebody has been heavy handed.

Where you will taste it here

• The crown of the rice. A ladle of plain cooked rice is stirred through the saffron water and spooned over the top, so the plate arrives gold on white.
• Joojeh kebab. Chicken sits overnight in saffron, onion juice and a little lemon. That is the whole marinade.
• Sholeh zard. The rice pudding at the end of the menu, which is really a way of eating saffron with a spoon.
• Tea. Ask and we will put a thread or two in the pot.

None of this is complicated. It is one of those ingredients where the work has already been done, in a field, by hand, before dawn. Our job is mostly not to waste it.