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Comment by c22 | Hacker News Reader

When I go to Safeway I can find a handful of saffron threads suspended in a small glass jar for about $23, or I can find a similar thing for $30 at a fancier grocer. Meanwhile, if I go to the nearby independent indian grocery store I can get a cigarette-pack-sized box of the stuff for about ten bucks. While it's definitely not the cheapest spice I don't feel bad about liberally using it in my chai recipe and a box usually lasts me a couple months.

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It's a near certainty that what you're buying at the Indian store is fake.

Check out these two sources and maybe run a test?

https://sadafpack.com/blog/how-can-we-distinguish-original-s...

https://motherwouldknow.com/how-to-identify-real-saffron-avo...

A local restaurant where I live has a dish (chili pepper squid) where they add a generous amount of saffron to it, and I always wondered how they can keep the cost so low.

Now when I looked at the pictures on the website you linked, it definitely looks like the fake stuff.

> https://sadafpack.com/blog/how-can-we-distinguish-original-s...

The contents on the website are a bit.. weird? Good 'ol GPT maybe?

> 3. Distinguishing fake saffron with gasoline Saffron does not dissolve in gasoline. Therefore, by dissolving saffron in gasoline, you can decide if your saffron is original or fake.

This doesn't make sense.

> #first stage;

Put saffron in water. In some cases it will change the color of the water very quickly; but this color change is not worth it, because this fast color change signifies fake saffron.

#second stage;

Put the root in water for a short time. When you remove the root from the water, the original saffron does not lose its color, while if it is fake, it loses its added color completely and does not look the same.

Either someone is poor at communicating in English and using heading styles, or this is some kind of poor quality hallucination.

A personal method I think is effective (especially you are familiar with saffron's smell/taste), is to soak a little of it (as mentioned) for a few hours, and taste it. It should have a slightly sweetish, herbal taste.

you want to buy your saffron from people who don't speak english, trust me

Sure, but I wouldn’t expect such a person to know to use a # for headings either.

First archived version on the wayback machine is from November, 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201127234815/https://sadafpack...

Thank you!

When have you seen ChatGPT write English like that?

I think earlier versions (GPT2? 3?) were a bit wonky in the sense that they'd make sentences which appeared grammatically correct but not actually make sense. But I didn't play around with them too much. Anyway, the article was nearly the same in 2020 so it's unlikely to be that.

I'm a bit surprised why being cautious and pointing out suspicious parts warrants downvotes. I'm happy to chat with anyone who thinks so to understand their perspective.

They grow it in Eastern Washington: https://cyrussaffron.com/about-us-1. And it is significantly cheaper than the imported stuff.

Thanks for sharing this!

I’m half Iranian and didn’t grow up with my dad, so I have very little cultural connection except for my love of Persian food.

It’s hard for me to justify buying the little bottles of Saffron at groceries stores given the price and the ratio of product to packaging.

Now I’m going to order from that company and step up my culinary game! Still not cheap but at least it feels like a good deal and I appreciate that it’s not shipped across the world and that it’s available in bulk.

I know the taste of saffron and have never not gotten real saffron at an Indian grocery store, atleast in the eastern United States.

> Meanwhile, if I go to the nearby independent indian grocery store I can get a cigarette-pack-sized box of the stuff for about ten bucks.

Worth noting that saffron adulteration in India is common enough that the country's Food Safety and Standards Authority disseminates public guidance on how to detect for it at home; see serial numbers 46 and 47 here[1].

[1] https://www.fssai.gov.in/cms/checkadulteration.php

Could it be fake, adulterated or poisonous somehow?

BS to downvote me for this comment. Cheap olive oil is counterfeit. Cheap milk, honey and coffee are adulterated with fillers. Cheap tumeric is colored with lead oxide

I can buy some of your claims, but how do you adulterate a coffee bean?

You add fillers to the ground product.

Coffee beans are bin-sorted in a way where the good coffee gets better, and the lesser coffee gets worse.

The most-shapely and consistent beans go to the more-premium lines.

The small, underdeveloped, or misshapen beans (called "clinkers") go to the cheaper lines, along with the other defects. And so does the chaff from the coffee hulls, which is rolled up into weird little balls and thrown in too -- which is not done with premium coffees. The unavoidable portion of insect parts is higher in cheap coffee than it is in expensive coffee.

In an ideal world, all of the stuff that is removed from premium coffees would be used as compost or something.

But it is instead included in the lesser coffees, where it is consumed.

Not always. I've done the color test on a lot of cheap spices I get in the middle eastern stores I can go to and they've always passed the tests. Sometimes it's cheaper because you're not paying for it to be portioned into little glass jars and sold as an exotic, rare thing like it is in western european cuisine.

Downvotes were for poison hyperbole almost certainly

Poison seems totally fair. Counterfeit tumeric can have high amounts of lead. Lead being one of those chemicals with no safe amount.

We literally have a cinnamon adulteration case going through the US right now. Children were poisoned by applesauce with adulterated cinnamon.

Cheap olive oil from Costco is not counterfeit. Cheap honey from Costco isn't counterfeit. Cheap vanilla from Costco is...once again, not counterfeit.

Moral: Buy things from Costco.

Olive oil should be used within a reasonably short time of opening, which makes Costco-sized bottles less practical. We buy honey and vanilla extract from Costco, but we don't use olive oil anywhere near fast enough to justify buying Costco-sized jugs.

My family makes a small batch of olive oil from a couple of big trees we have and have never gotten through what we make that fast, even though we use a lot. What's the problem in taking long to consume it? (Months)

I assume that the olive oil I buy in the store is very old compared to fresh-pressed oil. Similarly, my aunt has an avocado tree, and her fresh-picked avocados stay ripe for weeks, unlike the store-bought kind that have a sweet spot of ~36 hours.

Olive oil somm here (yeah that's a thing!)

Olive oil (and all cooking oils in general) are the opposite of wine - once bottled they start degrading and any additional exposure to air, light, heat degrades them further.

What degrades specifically? Usually it's the nuanced flavors and health benefits of good extra virgin, it'll usually be fine for cooking but you're losing out on the purposeful decision of using olive oil over vegetable oils (gross)

Olive oil is so much cheaper in bulk. Do you have any tips for how to preserve it? Intuitively, I would assume that re-bottling a large volume into several small bottles (and then keeping the extras sealed and in the dark) would be better than using a larger bottle continuously. Does that hold up to your experience?

If exposure to air is bad, it's possible that re-bottling wouldn't work well. I don't know if bottled olive oil is treated like many other packaged foods and sealed in with an inert(ish) gas, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case. I don't know how you could replicate that at home.

Fill something into a smaller bottle. The stock:

Freeze

No light

Add a little vitamin E. Vit e catches to radicals and therefore prevent oxygenation

I can easily taste the difference between food cooked with olive oil and natural oils as long as it's a relatively mild dish with a limited number of flavors (which is the appropriate use case).

It's so weird to me when people act like neutral oil has no applications. Olive oil can be good without neutral oils having to be bad. They're just good for different things.

Not lead oxide, lead chromate. So you can get all the hexavalent chromium you could ever need. But by "cheap", I think you mean "the absolute dodgiest crap that mostly never even gets exported from Bangladesh".

Not saying anything about your case but I see a lot of people confusing Safflower and Saffron and it's not always clearly labeled. They can add a similar color but thats about it. FWIW, I like to keep a little saffron in honey then use that for tea it vs adding threads directly.

It's almost definitely fake

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