Spare no expense!

     Last night I made rice pilaf to accompany the slices of roast pork I served with a cranberry sauce.  The recipe came from the Food Network website and was provided by Alton Brown (Good Eats).  If you are familiar with his show, he goes into great detail and cooks with the accuracy and precision of a molecular biologist.  So I wasn't surprised to find some unsuspecting ingredients in his recipe, like orange zest, bay leaves and a pinch of saffron.  Wow!  Saffron!  It's the world's most expensive spice.  It is actually the dried stigma of the crocus plant and it imparts a unique flavor and color to food, namely rice and paella.  It takes about 70,000 crocus flowers to produce 5 pounds of stigmas and in turn then dry down to about 1 pound of saffron.  And because of the delicate nature of the crocus flower the stigmas are still harvested and separated from the other flower parts by hand.  It requires nearly 200 hours of labor for each pound of saffron to reach the market.
     No wonder it's so expensive!  At my favorite spice store, Penzey's, a mere cup of the Kashmir Indian saffron commands a king's ransom of $120.  I was fortunate to have some on hand thanks to the generous gift from a friend who brought some back from a vacation in Greece.  But it had remained in my spice cabinet for over 6 months as I pondered how and when to use this precious commodity.  Now was the opportunity to open this little treasure chest of tiny red stems and add them to my recipe.  It took some time to open the small air tight plastic container and it was only accomplished with help.  So I then followed the directions on the recipe and placed a pinch of the threads into a quarter cup of hot, but not boiling, water so they could steep and thus impart their characteristic golden hue and hay like aroma.  Then the brew was carefully poured into the rice mixture to bake in the oven for 15 minutes before setting on top of the stove for an equal amount of time prior to serving in a warmed bowl.

         So how did my expensive rice pilaf turn out?  It was yellow from the saffron, to be sure.  But did it add any flavor to the dish?  The jury is still out on that one.  Perhaps I will be better able to determine that when I serve up the pilaf later in the week as a base for some Szechuan shrimp.