What is Saffron? Where to buy, How to store? How to prepare & Use Saffron?

Hello friends I'm so excited today to present you with this short video uh answering the top five questions that we get asked over and over again in the past five six years these questions are what is saffron where to buy saffron and not get ripped off uh how to store it what to use it for and how to prepare it before we go further I want to just introduce ourselves my wife Matthew and I we started this company back in 2016 because we are passionate about good food we are passionate about saffron and we wanted

to present the saffron from our country Iran to the whole world so that's why we are here our purpose is to basically you know introduce saffron not only that but educate people so they don't get ripped off by many cheeky players in the market which are not doing the right thing by people so let's get going answering the first question what is saffron so as you can see on the screen these beautiful flowers the purplish flowers called crocus sativas and the three red threads that grow in the middle of these flowers is what is pulled

out dried and sold as saffron the king of all herbs and spices saffron has been used for over 5000 years there are historical records showing that the ancient people were using it not only for medicinal but also for Arts as well as culinary so today we know saffron is used in many dishes desserts drinks as well as in Pharmaceuticals and arts so the first thing you want to know when you're going to buy saffron is whether you're buying it from a local store or you're buying it online so if you're buying it from a local

store obviously you can take it in your hands you physically have a look at it sometimes they even allow you to open it and smell it if you are in a local like a Persian shop or Indian grocery the first thing you want to look at is the packaging if you know if you're selling the king of all the spices and you don't know how to package it then the company is either doesn't care or they don't know what they're putting out there now plastic actually releases a smell which saffron picks that up and once

it's stored in plastic saffron will actually have a plastic smell to itself now I'll probably repeat myself a few times in this video but saffron is extremely extremely sensitive so it picks up heat it picks up uh smells it picks up moisture and it can damage its goodness its Aroma its color and its medicinal effects if it's exposed to plastic so you want to avoid plastic definitely you want to avoid any sort of container like as you see in the second picture which has plastic and metal because this yes it does protect it in some

ways but it allows UV light and sunlight to get in if saffron is stored on a shelf for a few months then this will affect it the next one that you see is a glass bottle glass is good but it doesn't protect it from UV and sunlight the best sort of container that you want to buy the saffron in is a sealed container that it doesn't allow moisture light or anything else to get into the Container as you can see in the last image on the screen so the next thing you want to do once

you bought your saffron in a nice packaging you take it home and you smell it now the smell of saffron is very very unique it's a woody floral earthy sort of a smell if you have a smell that once in your life you probably never forget that that that memory will stay in your brain so whenever you smell it again you will know now if you take the package home and you open it up and it doesn't have a great Aroma there are two reasons one could be that you got ripped off second one could

be that it's a very old product that means it's lost its Aroma the next thing that we're going to talk about is when you look at the saffron so you get it home you smell it it's in a good packaging the other way you can make sure that you're not getting ripped off and this is not fake is by looking at the shapes of the stigma I have enlarged one of the stigmas in this image as you can see it looks very much like a flute so it starts thin and then it grows and it

becomes fatter at the end that's where the pollens actually get in so and the color is very deep red uh as you can see in the three images at the bottom of the picture uh these are some of the fake stuff that people are selling in the market unfortunately it's very sad to see this um you know they're giving the saffron Market a very bad name just to make a few hundred dollars which is it's just a shame but anyway you need to inform yourself you need to be aware of what you're buying and here

I'm trying to help with showing you these pictures um the first one is actually called safflower safflower is not saffron it's uh it's a beautiful flower you might even have a few in your garden it grows pretty much very easy it's used to extract oil from it does have a little bit of yellowish color when it uh when you simmer it in in hot water but it's not saffron and that being sold in in many places as saffron and people are actually falling for it uh the third image on the right is actually corn silk

which has been dyed red and sold at saffron so these are some of the things you want to be aware of that's when you're buying it physically but what if you're buying it online when you're buying online you need to basically ask a few questions uh the first question you want to ask the seller is that how this saffron has been dried so the drawing process is actually very very important these days unfortunately saffron is put through dehydration machines that there are many industrial dehydration machines that heat the saffron to a degree that it actually

destroys its bio components now if you're just cooking with it and you want the aroma and color and the Beautiful flavor that might be okay if the saffron has been dried in a industrial dehydrator but if you're using it medicinally definitely definitely ask this question and if the seller knows the answer they will tell you the truth but you'll pick it up in your gut you'll know that if they're telling the truth or not what I would look for personally is a saffron that has been dried traditionally the farmer goes out they pick the flour

before the sun comes up they bring the flowers in they actually take this stigma goes out they lay it on a sheet in room temperature and because saffron grows in very dry sort of deserty area within no time in a couple of days the the product would be nice and dry and it's packed and shaped so that's the sort of saffron I'll be looking for that has been dried traditionally not in a machine the other questions you want to be asking does the seller have a money back guarantee and if there is a return policy

on their website definitely look for these signs because if the seller is uh very proud and confident about their product then there shouldn't be any problem of giving you money back guarantee 30 days money back guarantee for example if they are not so confident then they probably hesitate about this now in our own website uh saffronize.com you will see in our return policy that says go ahead and use about one percent of the product if you still don't believe that you got some of the best saffron in the world we'll take it back and we

give you your money no questions asked and thankfully since 2016 when we started our business we haven't had one return due to bad quality or people not being satisfied we talk about how to store saffron now again saffron is sensitive to heat to moisture and to UV light sunlight and so you want to keep it in a tight container even if you have some saffron that is you know you bought it long time ago it's in plastic or in a jar or whatever put it in a maybe a grass container or a metal container and

if it's in a glass cover it up with a bag or something so it doesn't get direct light to it and keep it in fridge preferably in the door of the fridge where the temperature is not you know really cold but around 5 Centigrade uh I think it's 41 Fahrenheit uh keep it refrigerated don't expose it to sound don't expose it to UV when you take it out and you use it for cooking don't forget and leave it on the countertop um and you know amount of time that I've heard that people say to me

you know I've got some saffron uh you know my daughter brought it for me from Iran or turkey or Spain or and it's I've had it for like five years please don't keep it that long you want to use your saffron within a year maximum of two and if it's just stored correctly in the right container in the right condition it will have no problem it will still have its Aroma in color so try to use it look you can put it in your tea coffee um I Love It In My Soup we make cookies

we make cakes any sort of Stew any sort of marination salad dressing you can use saffron in anything there is no limit to it let's talk about actually what do you suffering for culinary usage medicinal usage and art we're not let's talk about art at the moment regarding usage for food drinks you know I just spoke about it you can use it in basically anything and don't worry about its medicinal benefits while you're cooking with it because obviously it's going to be exposed to heat you know whether it's a stew or soup and it's not

going to be used as a medicine so you just want to really enjoy the flavor the aroma and the color of it but if you're using it in food then you know if it's if your food has a lot of liquid in it like if it's a skew or a soup then you don't have to do anything just grab a good pinch about 100 150 milligram depending on how many people you're cooking for put it in there and try to do this right at the end of the cooking process so you don't want to lose

all the aroma and you know boil it and boil it so for example turmeric it needs a lot of heat and time so you want to add it at the beginning of the cooking process but saffron you want to add it right at the end of the cooking process if the food it doesn't have a lot of liquid let's say you're doing a roast what you want to do is basically put a nice pinch in a size of like a shot glass no more of warm water leave the warm water leave the liquid there while

you're doing your cooking and right at the end use that liquid with all of its ingredients all the stigma to put it over your beef or lamb or whatever you're roasting chicken seafood and that way you you'll you'll get all the aroma and the color right at the end before you serve the fruit I mean you can use it a little bit at the beginning or the middle but leave the most of it for that the end right before you serve so you have that beautiful color and aroma if you want to use saffron for

medicinal purposes there are there are hundreds maybe even thousands now in the past 15 20 years just about every university has some sort of a research that they put out about saffron and it's incredible the the amount of information that is coming in you know we always knew that saffron is used for depression uh for Eye Health for blood circulation uh for sexual problems for PMS but nowadays they are coming out with information where they've used saffron on Alzheimer's patients um uh for children that have ADHD and all sorts of research that is coming out

which is incredible I very much encourage you if you're after the medicinal benefits of saffron do your own research Let's uh let's talk about how to prepare saffron for medicinal usage this is quite easy you can use cold water and that would be just fine but the the process that I'm showing you on the screen is the process that we actually came up with my wife who's a scientist she did this process and and we had a really great result and this is using crushed ice you put a spoon of powdered saffron which you can

do at home very simply probably do a video on that as well you just don't want to heat your saffron in a grinder so much so do it very gently whatever you however you grinding it a spoon of sat powdered saffron then cover it about an inch of crushed ice about two centimeters leave it in room temperature once it melts you you'll be left with this beautiful golden aromatic liquid which is really just amazing Nature's medicine you want to keep it cold so you want to keep it in the fridge if you're not going to

use it straight away but you can also use this within like a week and every day just do about 30 drops under your tongue and or or in a glass of water if you don't like the flavor and you will soon realize that how quickly this works on on your system and the first thing I noticed personally was the increase of serotonin in my system so you feel lighter energetic more focused and at night time all that serotonin changes to melatonin so you get a better rest deeper sleep and this is like the beginning of

the the effects that's going to have on you if you use saffron for long term term there are multiple benefits that you will have which is probably outside this scope of this video let me make another video I will have nothing to speak about that as I said she's the scientist in the family so this is how you prepare it for medicinal usage if you don't have crushed eyes or you know if you don't have time to do all that sort of thing just use cold water and every time you want to use it as

medicine just prepare a little bit not a whole lot prepare what you're going to be using for a day or two keep the rest in the fridge and you'll be fine now there are other ways of using saffron as a medicine these are I suppose more convenient ways I love the Nano extract capsules it's just simple it's convenient I leave it next to my shaving stuff and every morning I just take two capsules and I'm off so that's a very simple way of taking it there are many many saffron capsules in the market please do

your own research what we have seen from the feedback of the people that have been taking it for past four or five years it's been incredible so I'm very confident if you'd like to try it this is one of the easiest way most convenience way to try saffron as a medicine the other ways are the saffron liquid the saffron powder in the red capsule there and the saffron granules which is our latest Discovery I mean when I say latest about a year or so two years the granules are actually done by a bunch of young

scientists in Iran which for the first time they have been able to um extract The Crossing which is the main bio component that we want out of saffron using nanotechnology and turn it into granules and they're using apple as uh the thing that helps them to extract the cursing so this these granules are actually vegan for people who are concerned about that and they dissolve in liquids they dissolve in water you can basically put four five six granules in your drinking water or any other drinks that you're having and off you go it's very simple

to use I wouldn't suggest to put this in any sort of food or dressing or anything like that just use it as medicine um the other way that I would probably love to suggest here which is uh using saffron in Honey now we do have a product called saffron honey it is not extremely strong but it's a just a beautiful way to add a little saffron to your day with the flavor of raw honey from Sunshine Coast which is on its own it's a medicine anyway we don't pasteurize or heat the honey it's all raw

straight from the hives to the bottle and we have a cold process of infusing saffron into the honey which takes sometimes eight to twelve weeks depending on the weather and this is another way of just using saffron every day now I'd like to thank you for uh staying this along with me as a as a token of my appreciation I have left a little discount code at the bottom of the page here love saffron underscore 23 and if you like to get 10 off anything from our shop please use this code at the checkout and

you'll have your 10 off again thank you so much please do share this video with your loved ones or anyone who has questions about saffron really appreciate it if you can give us a thumbs up as well thank you bye for now