If you were to ask me the importance of spices in my everyday life, I'd probably give you an answer of usefulness between bottle caps and lollipops. Although they're pretty important in cooking, I'm not one to cook. I can't even use the microwave without burning myself. But as of late, there has been a spice, a spice so peculiar yet so treasured, that has caught my interest. Deriving overseas from Crete, it is the ridiculously expensive gold-strung flower, bearing highly sought-after velvet threads. It is the Crocus Sativus; Saffron.
Saffron is a small, purple flower that bears distinct red stigmas and bright yellow stamens. Although pretty, it is cool for more than just its appearance. For one, the threads of saffron, which are the highly sought-after stigmas, are incredibly intriguing as although they appear red, once you put them in any food it dyes the whole dish in a yellow hue ten times brighter than my future. But this cool property of the plant does not come dime a dozen. If you want to acquire the power to make every meal of yours bumblebee-yellow it'll set you back around $1500-$15000 CAD per kilogram. So probably not the best investment.
If you are considering using saffron as a spice, however, you may want to just chill and take it easy. Though saffron has a bunch of health benefits, if you consume more than 12 grams of those threads at once, chances are you will die. So please, don't do that.
If you are still not convinced that saffron is insanely epic then let me tell you a story. A story about how a simple spice caused a war during the 1300s. Basically, during 1346-1353 the Black Death decided to pay Europe and visit and killed a bunch of people. People began to panic, but then this one genius suddenly thought that saffron could be the secret cure to ending the Black Death (Spoiler alert, it was not). As a result, everybody started fighting each other and bashing heads over saffron, to the point where pirates patrolling the Mediterraneans started ignoring gold carriers and driven their focus to only Saffron boats. The era of the Black Death was truly the greatest high of Saffron.
By now you might be thinking to yourself, wondering why you just spent the last three minutes of your life reading about the powers of saffron. And so am I. I can almost feel the quality of my writing deteriorate like that of the value of bitcoin as I continue to write this blog. But saffron's a pretty plant so reading this was probably a better use of time than anything else you're going to do today.
