Having bought saffron carefully, most people then waste more than half of it in the kitchen. Not through extravagance — through three specific habits, all of which are easy to fix and none of which cost anything.
Bloom it. Always.
Saffron threads dropped whole into a dish release a fraction of what they hold. The compounds that carry colour and flavour are water-soluble and they need time and liquid to come out.
Blooming means steeping the threads in a small quantity of warm liquid before they go anywhere near the pan. Warm, not boiling — boiling liquid drives off the aromatics you are trying to capture. Around 60 to 70 degrees is right, which in practice means water that has been off the boil for a minute or two.
Use just enough liquid to cover: a tablespoon or two. Leave it twenty minutes if you can, and up to an hour if you are organised. The liquid will turn deep gold. Add the liquid and the threads to the dish together, near the end of cooking.
The difference is not subtle. The same quantity of saffron, bloomed properly, colours and flavours roughly twice as much food.
Crush the threads first, lightly
Grind the threads briefly with a pinch of sugar or salt in a mortar before blooming. The abrasive gives the pestle something to work against, and the increased surface area extracts faster and more completely.
Do not grind to a powder. You want the threads broken, not pulverised — over-grinding warms the material and loses aroma.
Use far less than you think
This is where most money goes. Saffron is not a spice you add to taste in the usual sense: past a fairly low threshold it turns bitter and medicinal, and more of it makes a dish worse rather than stronger.
As a rough guide, a generous pinch — somewhere around 15 to 20 threads — is enough for a dish serving four. A biryani for eight might take twice that. A litre of milk for kesar doodh needs about a dozen threads, bloomed in a little of the warm milk first.
If you have been using a quarter-teaspoon at a time, you have been using several times what the dish needed and probably making it slightly bitter in the process.
Storing it
Saffron fades through light, heat and air, in that order of importance.
Keep it in an airtight container, opaque or in a dark cupboard, at room temperature. Do not refrigerate it — moving it in and out of the cold causes condensation inside the jar, and moisture is the one thing that will genuinely ruin saffron rather than merely dull it.
Bought in reasonable quantity and stored properly, it holds well for a year and remains perfectly usable for two, gradually losing aroma before it loses colour.
A test worth doing once
Bloom twenty threads in a little warm water and leave them an hour. Then look at the threads.
Good saffron will still be red, and the water will be deep gold. If the threads have gone pale and the water is red, you have learned something important about that jar — and the water test you should have run at the point of purchase has run itself in your kitchen instead.
